then everyone would do it

there's no way to say this without sounding like a moron, so i'll just say it: writing a decent script is hard. insanely hard.

here's my anecdotal evidence:

i'm now semi-officially meeting with two different writing groups. each has 6-7 writers in it, give or take a few, and in each group i'm talking about people with no small degree of experience. these aren't people who just decided to give screenwriting a try as a get-rich-quick scheme; we're talking experienced filmmakers in one group and seasoned actors/playwrights in the other.

everyone is struggling with something. one gets her characters figured out, but plot--who knows? another can hammer out a plot like nobody's business, but worries that the characters feel like stereotypes. and almost nobody is comfortable with those other pieces that are supposed to magically appear with their scripts: the one-sheet, the treatments, the dreaded log lines.

writing a script is like a decathlon--you've got to be pretty damn good at so many different things.

but if it was easy...