Filmmaker John Vorhaus on the habits that quietly sabotage new writers

Starting out as a screenwriter means navigating a process that can feel overwhelming, and many early habits form before writers even realise they are working against themselves. Filmmaker John Vorhaus sat down with Film Courage to identify some of the most common traps, offering practical ways to sidestep them.\n\nOne of the more counterintuitive pitfalls involves getting too attached to early ideas. Exploring every lead during a draft is genuinely useful, since chasing characters, plot threads and themes without a fixed destination allows the story room to breathe and develop. The problem arrives when it is time to cut something that no longer serves the script.\n\nNewer writers often feel a sense of loyalty to the ideas that first excited them, as though abandoning those ideas means betraying the original creative spark. Vorhaus pushes back on that thinking. A strong idea does not have to survive to the final draft to have been valuable; sometimes its highest purpose is to serve as a stepping stone toward something better before being discarded entirely.\n\nThe second major habit Vorhaus highlights is a lack of fearlessness in the first draft. Holding back on bold or unconventional choices early in the process can flatten a script before revision even begins, robbing writers of the raw material they need to find what the story is really about.