Proven. Better. New.
Don't spend your originality solving problems scribblers solved centuries ago. Spend it crafting what audiences haven't seen yet.
Mark Pincus founded Zynga. In his book Life at the Speed of Play, he lays out a creative framework that sounds counterintuitive the first time you hear it.
He calls it Proven. Better. New.
Find something that already works. Make it better. Add something original.
Deceptively simple. The reason it works is because every successful creative industry already operates this way.
The key insight is where you direct your energy. Many creators waste enormous amounts of their time reinventing solutions audiences have already accepted. Energy spent rebuilding proven systems is energy that could have gone toward crafting emotional and experiential differentiation.
Game Developers Have This Figured Out
Nobody in games wins awards for inventing a new inventory screen. Nobody buys a game because the daily rewards system is revolutionary. Players care whether the game is fun.
Mechanics are scaffolding. Experience is the product.
Screen scribes operate out of a different floor in the same building. The scaffolding exists. What will you build inside it?
Don’t Reinvent Structure
Many aspiring scribblers go sideways by striving to craft new story structures. New character archetypes. New approaches to scenes. The result is often confusion, not originality. Even both.
Storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest technologies. The fundamentals aren’t broken. Conflict works. Reversals work. Character arcs work. Mystery works. Cliffhangers work.
You don’t get points for replacing them. You get points for using them effectively to trigger emotions and inspire engagement.
The Spec Market Wants
There’s a persistent misconception that spec buyers want what they’ve never seen before.
They don’t. They want something they recognize immediately and remember afterward. Successful specs run a familiar engine wrapped around a fresh idea.
A detective story with a new setting. A thriller with a new premise. A horror movie with a monster nobody’s seen before. A familiar genre refracted through a specific, unexpected lens.
The audience needs enough familiarity to understand the ride. Enough novelty to justify buying a ticket. Like what Mark Pincus calls - Proven. Better. New.
The Framework for Scribblers
Proven is stuff that already works. Structure. Conflict. Escalation. Character goals. Emotional payoffs. Don’t spin your wheels redesigning the wheel.
Better is execution. Dialogue. Pace. Scenes. Character. Where professionals earn their living.
New is the originality bit. Premise. Perspective. Setting. Combinations nobody’s tried. Don’t spread originality evenly across the script. Concentrate it where audiences will actually notice it.
Three jobs. Three distinct places to put your energy. Scribblers who can figure out which is which tend to survive versus those who treat every page like it’s a blank canvas.
Masters Understand
Recognize excellence and leave it alone.
Most inexperienced scribes will change things just to prove they changed things. Experienced scribblers will know some solutions survive because they’re already close to optimal.
Recognizing what works is every bit as critical as inventing something new.
That principle doesn’t stop at the script. It runs through every level of the craft. A room of scribblers keeps reworking a scene that already works. A showrunner rewrites a performance out of habit. A franchise loses audience by renovating something nobody asked them to adjust. An adaptation that mistakes fidelity to plot for fidelity to what made the source material resonate.
Sometimes the smartest creative decision isn’t adding something. It’s preserving something.
Questions Worth Asking
When you’re developing a screenplay, ask -
— What am I borrowing because it already works?
— What am I improving through my execution?
— What am I contributing that feels uniquely me?
If you can answer all three of those cleanly, you’re probably directing your creative energy in the right direction.
And don’t forget — Audiences rarely remember the plot/mechanics. They remember the emotions/experience.
Proven gets them in the seat. Better keeps them in the chair. New is the reason they’ll remember your script instead of the hundred others they’ll read that month.