So, have you heard that Amazon wants to get into the movie making business? They’ve just opened up what they are calling Amazon Studios.

“Win money. Get noticed. Get your movie made.”

They are saying that when you upload a script, anyone can look it over and make any changes they want. That is a really bad idea, not because my words are precious and can’t be changed… but because 90% of the people who think they can write are very, very wrong.

Just because you can string together words coherently doesn’t make you a writer. It is like any craft or skill and it takes years of dedicated effort and a lot of innate talent to get truly good at it.

“Your first million words are crap” – I’m pretty sure that it was Robert Heinlein I first read this from but it has also been ascribed to many other writers.

While truly horrible writing could probably be raised up to the merely bad- any good writing will be dragged down to that level as well.

The chances that a good script will be “improved” by a million of these guys hammering on a million keyboards is so slim as to approach zero.