2026 > That Voice? It’s Not You. Oh, And It’s A Liar.
By Jason Long
25 Feb 2026
Hi. It’s me, Jason Long. From Calgary (yes, that Calgary). Not sure what I’m doing here.
Apparently I wrote a short screenplay last year that I submitted to the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition and it didn’t totally suck.
It also didn’t totally win, so, I guess 4th place means you get to blog?
Blogs still happen? Even with AI? Should this be AI? It’s not, but should it be? Is there even a point to this what am I doing I quit…
There it is. That Voice. It just tried to murder my creative fun before I even got cookin’.
None of you know me. Maybe you’ll read this space over the next year and get to know me a bit more intimately, we’ll see how share-sies I’ll get, me being a lifetime non-blogger suddenly blogging for the first time ever.
Is this going well? Am I blogging correctly? I’m supposed to have a point, get to the point, what is my point, you’re about to be fired from this volunteer opportunity!!
Insidious, no? This Voice. That Voice. The Voice. Not the singin’ tv show. The. Voice. I don’t have to elaborate, you all know what I’m talking about.
But where does The Voice come from? Again, not the singing show, that’s a beloved NBC vehicle, recognize. Most people would say That Voice “comes from my mind”. I mean it’s our thoughts, right? All of them. Good, bad, positive, negative, benign, freaky-weird-embarrassing. It comes from us. We are That Voice, we are our own worst critic, right?
Imma gonna tell you what my over six hundred years as a screenwriter, playwright, and perogy aficionado has taught me — and pardon my strong language in advance:
That’s hot garbage.
That Voice? It’s not you. Don’t even try and argue the point with me. I’m old, I’m wise, and my perogies are getting cold.
It’s a tape. It’s an 8 track VHS reel-to-reel Betamax answering machine tape, a collection of all the dumb and uninformed shit we’ve been told throughout our lives that we somehow decided to believe, why? Because we thought it was our thoughts, and therefore it informed our feelings and behaviors.
It’s Mom. Dad. Best friends. Social media. High school English teachers who are forced to teach curriculum and not creativity. Take it from me, the guy who just took over this blogosphere today for some reason, That Voice comes from everywhere but you.
So, please. For the love of perogies, tune it out. It’s not you, it’s a liar, it makes us sick, so, next. And no, it’s not so easy just to flick that switch and make the angry judgy barbs just go away. But you can — for periods of time, during your vital creative times — park it in the corner and tell it to shut the hell up.
Because who are you, really? Take That Voice out of your noggin, who are you? You’re freaking lovely. An honest intuitive creative soul who just wants to vibrate and flip out, in the best way, over that new idea that fell to you last night. You want to build it, stretch it, expand it, write it, shoot it, edit it, live it.
What happens to most of us, a lot of the time, is that shiny electric sparkly perfectly fantastic new idea falls to us and before we have time to embrace it and give it that cute li’l forehead smooch THAT VOICE COMES IN AND MURDERS IT IN FRONT OF OUR VERY EYES!!!
That idea has been done, no one wants to read that, no one wants to see that, it’s stupid, it’s too expensive, it can’t be done so don’t bother…
That’s not you. Trust me. It is not. You are the shiny electric sparkly you. And once you are able to trust that, and be able to observe That Voice from afar — or kind of side eye it in your mind when it starts talking shit — its power dissipates. Dwindles, dries up, evaporates.
And then you can get on with the really important stuff. Writing your stories, making your movies, the ones you want to make that have never been made before. And they will be authentic, and they will be new and shiny and sparkly, because they won’t be ideas that eventually became lacquered and sanitized and tainted and poisoned by That Voice.
If there’s a word count for this bloggity-blog, I am definitely over it.
The next one will be shorter. How do I end this?
Just end it, Dummy.
Well. Even a broken clock, right…?
Ready to enter one of the premier screenplay competitions in Canada?
Submissions are open for the 7th edition of the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition now until April 12th, 2026 via FilmFreeway , Stage 32 and Short Film Depot.
Submit your short script for your chance to get your film made and/or your already produced short film based on your words to get your work and creativity acknowledged and awarded!
2026 #WW Laureate
