I’m now officially doing script coverage for a Toronto production company. Reading other screenplays and analyzing them has been a great experience. Even just the simple act of reading screenplays will greatly increase your skill-set as a screenwriter. It’s been amazing reading screenplays from my peers at such an early stage it in the script’s life.
I am a self taught screenwriter for the most part and the first step I took was reading every screenplay I could get my hands on ( with the help of www.imsdb.com ) to learn the formatting and style choices the writers make that result in the movies we al watch. I’ve been asked by a few people about what they should be doing to learn how to write a screenplay, and the answer I keep coming back to is you’ve got to read them to write them.
There is no real trick or way ( that I know of ) to learn to become a creative person, but being creative alone isn’t enough. Without the drive and knowledge of how to execute your idea and efficiently convey it on paper to others is something that needs to be worked at.
You should also be prepared to write more then a few shall we say, not so great screenplays in your pursuits as a writer. We all have to shit sometimes. Don’t let it discourage you though, as writing a screenplay takes a lot out of you. You really have to have faith in your idea because I can guarantee you that after days, weeks, and months of working on a script your idea will start to seem less and less great. Some people think that writing a movie must be easy, I mean, they are less then 200 pages after all. How hard can that be? Right?
It didn’t take me long to realize how untrue that idea is, as I sort of thought the same going in. It will drain you, anger you, frustrate you and stress you out. If you stick to it though and work hard at it you just might write the next big feature film.
