"I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script"

I initially clicked through on this because I thought it was one of those snarky Onion-esque op-eds where a wickedly privileged person is a totally dickweed about some really basic aspect of polite human society.

But Olson--who garnered an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for A History of Violence--ends up making a really good point about the vast bulk of folks who "want to be writers," which is that they don't seem to want to spend the bulk of their time reading and writing. It's like someone who wants to be in the NBA but doesn't spend the bulk of his time sprinting, doing pushups, or playing basketball. At any rate, a worthy read (that, I now realize, I'm about three years late in reading. *sigh*)

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script - New York News - Runnin' Scared

And this is why I will not read your fucking script.

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

. . .

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.