Do you want a screenwriting career? A screenwriting career need not be an elusive dream. We all want to write our own stories. But the reality is that a very small percentage of screenwriters actually make a living by selling their own stories. Instead they make a living by turning other people’s stories and ideas into a screenplay. In the traditional writing world, they would be called ghostwriters. These are people who take on writing assignments for a client in exchange for money.

The writer will usually transfer all the rights to their screenplay over to the client after it is written. This might sound bad, but it is actually a great way to build your screenwriting career. Let’s say you try to sell your script to a producer or director and they don’t like it. The reason they don’t like it might not be because of the writing. It may be because of the story. So it is possible they could come back and offer you a job to write a new script for them simply because they like your writing style. You could even get agents to find your screenwriting work as well. This would be a great opportunity for beginning screenwriters to not only get screenwriting work, but to gain more experience and grow a bigger portfolio as well and a screenwriting career.

Screenwriters who aim to grow their screenwriting career with jobs from producers will need a calling card script. This is the kind of script that displays a screenwriter’s truly best writing talent. You may want to have multiple calling card scripts that each portrays a different character theme or genre. For example, film producers are all looking for something different. You might have one producer looking for a story with a strong female lead while others might just want a mindless action story. So if you can prove that you can write these kinds of stories through your calling card scripts, then it will impress a producer enough to where they will want to hire you to write their version of the story.

The producer may even have a poorly written screenplay from another writer that he wants to hire you to rewrite. This is a great source of income to improve your screenwriting career. Perhaps he just wants the dialogue scenes rewritten or maybe an entirely new third act. There is no telling what a producer may hire you to do as a screenwriter who works on their projects. But again, it’s still a job so you mine as well do it.

Source by John Halas