This question nets a wide variety of answers. “I needed one more class to graduate and thought I’d take a look at screenwriting, but I’ve got two backups in case I don’t like it.” I love the honesty.

“I’m crazy about movies. That’s what I do when I’m not doing anything else. And I’m hardly ever doing anything else.”

I’ve had students who have seen just about every movie ever made. With this group of people, who must have spent 40% of their lives watching movies, they are living, breathing human resources in class. They know plots, characters, and truckloads of arcane information.

One thing about teaching screenwriting that you rarely get in a novel or short story is full context, a almost complete frame of reference. You mention a movie title in class and everybody has seen it or knows something about it. Everybody can give you plot details or dish dirt on cast members. The frame of reference is immediate and massive.

For people to attempt writing a novel is like facing a mountain they do not want to climb. Short stories are satisfying but can you make living writing short stories?  Or poetry? Everybody should read poetry, wherein lives the soul of our language.

Screenwriting is the new manna from heaven. One hundred and seven pages. Do-able. If you write three pages a day for 40 days you have a first draft.

This is attractive to people that have wanted to tell a story but couldn’t find the medium with which to tell it. Screenwriting is all about character and action. Character is action. In movies, what one does is what one is. In writing movies you can’t see thought but you can see the manifestation of thought through action.

For instance, in A Beautiful Mind, instead of trying to gauge John Nash’s imaginary world through voice over and having others explain his problem, we understand, in one shocking scene, that an entire part of his life that we think is real (as he did) is not.

In this way, screenplays differ from the novel, short story, and poetry: if you can’t see it, it doesn’t belong on the page. Action replaces thought, dialogue replaces thought. Screenwriting takes place first and foremost in a visible and visual world.

Watching a movie is a passive experience. Reading, on the other hand, is active. The reader controls the environment, can pick up and put down the book at will. In a theater, there is not this option. What does this say about the different audiences? Books take time to read. Watching a movie takes one hundred minutes.

For me, books are lifeblood. They belong to you. In a book, you set the pace. Why would you want to write for the movies? After you finish your masterpiece and hand it in, all they want to do is change it.

Let’s say your script garners interest from agents and managers and producers, stars and directors, and looks as if it’s got a shot at the big screen. The first thing they do is fire you and hand your baby to fifty foster parents, all of whom are convinced they have striking ideas on how to improve it.

 Then, let’s say it’s produced. It comes out in a totally different medium. You write it on paper and it appears on celluloid or it’s digitized.  The story has changed shape, and look what they did to your characters! And what about that great dark ending you put on it, which is now light and airy and everybody gets what they want? You want to kill yourself. Is this the writing life you want?

They say that in the New York publishing world the writer is king. In Hollywood, he’s jester.

And then, the final insult: It might not even have your name on it because the first thing they did when they fired you was to hire another writer, then another, then four others, none of whom you’ve ever met. The actors and producers and directors added their changes to it, without consulting you. The Writers Guild’s arbitration board gathered all drafts and awarded credit to another writer, someone you have never met nor perhaps even heard of.

But, hey, you have a picture on, sort of, and people are willing to meet you, to hear your new ideas, and pitches. All so that you can go through that awful process again. Come on! What are you, a masochist?

Why would you want to work in a medium whose writers Louis B. Mayer once called “Schmucks with Underwoods” (a derogatory smear against ancient typewriters), a perception that has changed little in the last fifty years?

Ah, because you want to write. You need to write. And you love movies. And this is your manna from heaven. You’re determined, huh? You have a story burning in you, fifty stories burning in you, and you need to let them out of their cages. Writing movies is the only way you can do it. This is the only way you think you’ll be able to do it.

Okay, if that’s what you want, give it a shot. You already connect with movies in ways you have never connected with books or short stories or poetry. Digitized or celluloid veins snake through your body. Your blood runs in frames per second. Your eyes are projectors.

It’s your manna, your heaven.

A reminder: the writer always gets paid. If your picture is made you get to visit offices of agents and production companies that might have been denied to you. You get to work and hobnob with talented, gainfully employed movie people. You get to pitch treatments, scripts and ideas that prior to this nobody wanted to listen to.