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Why You're a Terrible Screenwriter, Explained

There's a really interesting* piece over at FiveThirtyEight looking at the ways in which amateur screenwriters fail. Using data collated from The Black List, a site to which writers submit their work in the hopes of winning the attention of Hollywood studios, Walt Hickey helps would-be screenwriters determine what types of scripts are most likely to fail and what problems most commonly plague their efforts.

Turns out, most amateur screenwriters are good at neither creating believable characters nor writing believable dialogue. Shocking, I'm sure. Here's Hickey:

[Blacklist script-reader overseer Kate] Hagen said novice screenwriters find writing good dialogue and characters particularly challenging. Genres that rely heavily on dialogue and characters — namely, comedies — tend to fare worse overall. On the other hand, niche dramas — particularly those set in a compelling time period, or at a particular location or event — claim the top spot. A good setting can compensate for poorer character development or dialogue, whereas when comedy misses, it misses big.

More interesting, at least to me, is the variation between genres—and the variation within genres. Some genres tend to be rated very poorly. Others, meanwhile, show huge swings in quality.

As it turns out, science-fiction scripts — those for alien invasion films, sci-fi/fantasy comedies and superhero movies — are some of the lowest-performing genres in our data set, and the general category of science fiction and fantasy does worse than the general set in most elements. ...

As any fan of the "American Pie" franchise can attest, sex comedies holding the top spot is an accurate reflection of the dizzying highs and disastrous lows of that genre of film. And a mere survey of the career of Roland Emmerich — who has given us both the stirring "Independence Day" and 1998’s lamentable "Godzilla" — backs up the idea that disaster movies are very, very hit or miss.

It strikes me that this is a particularly good example of data journalism: FiveThirtyEight is using a relatively obscure set of information to help explain a phenomenon that many people (at least, many people who enjoy movies) will find intriuging even if they'd never really thought about it before. I'm sure it won't get the clicks of VOX DOT COM classics like "Iggy Azalea is not the queen of rap," but it's infinitely more illuminating.

*If you're into reading screenplays, I guess.