Screenwriting : When someone tells you, "Everyone PA in Hollywood has a script in their closet" How do you react? by Rock Kitaro

Everyone in Hollywood DOES have a script in their desk. Why is that diminishing? It's true. 40-50,000 scripts registered every year. Even more than that written. All there is to say to that is "I know...So?"

There was a 12 year old girl with a laptop in Starbucks and I joked she was working on a script... when I walked past her later and looked at her screen, she was!

Unless someone is a 1 in a million prodigy, one's scriptwriting is only going to be as good as how much time one puts into it. If you are at the driving range 4 hours per day and playing 4 rounds a week over several years, and someone tells you they started golfing 3 months ago and play every other Saturday, you're going to like your chances of not just playing with them but completely destroying them... separate yourself from the others by making it a priority and by working harder than the next guy

It is amazing when I visit my inlaws in West Hollywood once a year. In the Coffee Bean there, there are often a half a dozen screenplays open on laptops. Quite extraordinary. The way to deal with it is to read amateur writers' screenplays. They're usually so awful you stop stressing out about their existence. Then what do you say to people? You can honestly say: "yeah, but theirs are lousy. Mine is good."

I would ignore it because everyone is not like you, everyone may not have that IT factor.... You might have it.

What Dave said. The thing you control is how hard you work. On some other thread someone said that most writers never write a second script, which is true... but if the average pro writer wrote 9 scripts before making a cent, how many people even get to 9 scripts? There is a huge learning curve with screenwriting that you are probably not aware of now. I look back on old scripts and think I was the worst writer in the history of screenwriting. As you write each new story in screenplay form you learn new things about how screenplays and the structure of stories work. The goal, here, is to have a screenplay that some complete stranger, who has read a stack of other screenplays, will select as the one they should buy... or that you are the writer they should hire for their project. Whether you think you are good doesn't matter as much as what the producer or agent or manager thinks. Those people are the ones "doing the hiring".

People who don't write, assume that writing is easy. Typing is easy. Writing is difficult. Because the most of us speak and read in a language, it's a given misconception that writing is easy and requires very little graft. There a great analogy I read somewhere (forget the book). If you mistakenly tell someone you're working on a screenplay, they'll happily tell you about their wonderful film and TV ideas. If you met a mathematician or scientist, would you start on about your ideas for a prime number generating equation or your Theory of Everything, just because you studied maths at school? Probably not . . .