Nobody wants to tell you your baby is ugly. Unfortunately, somebody should.

Writers love calling their screenplay "my baby". You conceived it, nurtured it, lost sleep over it and spent an alarming amount of money keeping it alive. There is only one problem. Your first baby may be hideous. And nobody wants to tell you. Friends peer into the pram and say, "Goodness, look at all that hair." Script readers have developed equally sophisticated survival techniques.

Your first screenplay is where you discover everything you didn't know you didn't know. You overwrite it. Introduce fourteen people before anyone knows whose story it is. Spend six weeks perfecting a subplot that eventually has to be taken behind the barn and shot. You write dialogue nobody has ever spoken outside a screenplay and protect a scene for months before discovering it does absolutely nothing. Excellent. That is what first projects are for.

The mistake is choosing the story you have treasured since you were nineteen as the place to learn all this. Every character is sacred. Every scene has sentimental value. You have already imagined the Oscar speech. Now you are attempting to learn screenwriting on it. That is like learning surgery on somebody you love.

Write something you like but could bear to murder. A short. A pilot. A contained feature. Finish it. Show it to people. Discover that the devastating scene makes everybody laugh and the hilarious scene produces the sort of silence normally associated with bereavement. Cut twenty pages. Rewrite it. Abandon it if it deserves abandoning. Start another.

This is the point writers often miss: finishing something that fails can teach you more than endlessly improving something that should have died three drafts ago. Your early projects are prototypes. Their job is to expose your weaknesses while the stakes are low. Creative experience is largely an accumulation of mistakes you become too embarrassed to make twice.

That is the real reason to save the baby. Your most precious idea may be the best intellectual property you ever create. Why hand it immediately to the least experienced screenwriter you will ever be?

Wait until you have broken structure and repaired it. Heard your dialogue fail aloud. Received notes you hated and later realised were right. Learnt which notes were wrong. Cut something brilliant because the story was better without it. Learnt the difference between being protective and being precious.

Then bring out the baby.

Eventually somebody has to judge the screenplay rather than the love that produced it. Nobody enjoys saying, "Your baby is ugly." Even fewer people enjoy saying, "Your baby is ugly and frankly you should have aborted it around page thirty." So they say the project is "interesting". It "has potential". It "needs further development". The film industry has developed an exquisite vocabulary for putting a blanket over the pram.

This is also why "I've spent ten years writing it" is not the selling point people imagine. Ten years proves that ten years have passed. You can spend ten years making soup. Eventually somebody still has to taste it. Passion matters. Your experience, obsession and connection to the material may be precisely why you should make it. But suffering is not creative authority. A producer cares what all that work produced.

Even a beautiful baby eventually has to leave home. Producers give notes. Directors reinterpret. Actors discover things. Budgets arrive carrying an axe. If every suggestion is met with, "You don't understand, I've been developing this since 2016," people start calculating how exhausting working with you is going to be.

Protect what makes the project exceptional. Kill what merely took a long time to write. And perhaps stop calling it your baby.