No. 07 / Robert McKee, a wise voice on storytelling, highlights an important point:
Mastery of genre is essential for yet one more reason: Screenwriting is not for sprinters, but for long-distance runners. No matter what you’ve heard about scripts dashed off over a weekend at poolside, from first inspiration to last polished draft, a quality screenplay consumes six months, nine months, a year, or more. Writing a film demands the same creative labor in terms of world, character, and story as a four-hundred-page novel. The only substantive difference is the number of words used in the telling.
A screenplay’s painstaking economy of language demands sweat and time, while the freedom to fill pages with prose often makes the task easier, even faster. All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant. Ask yourself, therefore, what will keep your desire burning over those many months?
Generally, great writers are not eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.
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I agree, Ehsan Rahimpour. Writing a script seems fast and easy, but it's not. That's something aspiring writers should know. One of the things that keeps my desire burning over while I work on a script is being excited about the concept.
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You’re right Maurice Vaughan, writing a screenplay is really a long relationship with an idea. When the core concept inspires you, that feeling becomes the energy that makes the process not just bearable but enjoyable. Even the hard parts start to make sense because you’re mentally invested in the idea.
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Think this is only just starting to dawn on me and I'm not far into the process.