Screenwriting 101: Bruce Joel Rubin

“The film [Jacob’s Ladder] was beginning to feel shallow, stagnant. I felt trapped. Something was missing. For nearly three days I stopped working. I felt the script was a disaster in the making and I grew terribly depressed. I didn’t want to proceed. I had come to this point in many scripts, that moment of total devastation, where you realize that what you are writing is absolute garbage, that you have strayed from your path, and that you are deluded to think you were ever a writer in the first place. How a writer overcomes this obstacle is in many ways what determines his success or failure. It is a time of battle, of sacrifice, of killing your babies as some writer once said. It is a terrible and ultimately liberating struggle, if you get through it. It weds you to your material in a blood ceremony that makes it yours. It becomes your life.”

— Bruce Joe Rubin (Jacob’s Ladder, Applause Books, 1990)

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