Screenwriting 101: Marc Norman
“There are two ways to make a living as a screenwriter. The first is by selling spec scripts — doing only what interests you. The other way is by hiring yourself out on assignment. Guys writing only on spec, God bless them. It’s a ballsy way to go. They figure they’l write what they want to write, maybe they’ll sell it and maybe they won’t. If they don’t, then they go on to the next thing. I admire that, but I don’t know how you raise a family that way. Myself, I have all sorts of internal trepidation. I’ll tell you some words of wisdom someone told me a long time ago. He said that you can make a fortune writing in the movie business, but you can’t make a living. Sure, someone may buy this script from you for a ton of money, but doing it over and over for a lifetime is hard.
“The way to have a real career as a writer is to hire yourself out. That’s not to say that you can’t do both; I certainly have. But when you do hire yourself out, the thing you have to remember is that you better put some passion on the page. If you yourself aren’t passionate about the project, you’re not going to do a very good job. Let’s say the story is about someone stealing some diamonds. Then you have to find something about stealing diamonds that excites you. So what you do is, after wasting a certain number of days thinking about how to get passionate about diamonds, you think, ‘Well maybe I won’t get passionate about the diamonds; maybe I’ll get passionate about why the guy needs the money, or maybe I’ll get passionate about why the guy is turning back to crime when he wasn’t going to do it anymore.” Something like that. That’s how you find a way to bring some kind of personal agenda to the assignment.”
— Marc Norman (Shakespeare in Love) from “Oscar-Winning Screenwriters on Screenwriting,” edited by Joel Engel