Where will I hang my lanterns?

Aaron Sorkin & Steve Zaillian

Last night I attended the Writers Guild's Oscar- and WGA-nominee panel "Beyond Words" and as I always do after these things, I came home inspired. To write? Well, yes. But not just write, to write well. To keep at it. To become better. To become the best. Because up there on that stage, those were some of the best.

This week I've been working, not writing per say, but rewriting, editing, and proofreading. And while, to the average person, that may not seem like a big job or even much work at all, I have to say -- it is. It really is. As I go back through my portfolio and read scripts I wrote almost three years ago and scripts I wrote three months ago, I see how much I have changed, how much I have grown as a writer. It's not visible to the novice eye but to me, I feel it in my bones.

One thing Aaron Sorkin said last night stayed with me and I rushed home to write it down before I could forget (because while I can write all the words in the world, I cannot memorize them to save my soul).

Get to the end of what you're writing and start again. Then figure out what to hang your lanterns from.

To me, that was the essence of what the writing process is all about -- rewriting. It's about getting my stories out there, down on paper, so I can see what I have to work with. Then it's about the cutting, the piecing back together, the figuring out what's best, what works (that's where you want your lanterns) and what doesn't.

And I realized, that's what I've been doing this week. I haven't been creating anything new. I haven't started a fresh spec or a spankin' new pilot. I haven't freewritten or crafted dialogue. But I have started again. I've been going over and over what I have to make it better. To make it the best.

And to me, that's what life's all about. Doing our best, doing everything we can until we can't do anything more. Because if that's not what it's all about, then why even try?