Editing Screenwriter (section)

==Profession==
Screenwriting is a contracted freelance profession, not a hired position. No education is required to be a professional screenwriter, but good [[storytelling]] abilities and [[imagination]] give aspiring screenwriters an advantage. Many screenwriters start their careers doing [[speculative work]] ("work on spec"), practicing their screenwriting with no guaranteed financial compensation. If one of these scripts is sold, it is called a [[spec script]]. Amateur screenwriters will often pursue this work as "writers in training," leading these spec scripts to often go uncredited or come from unknown screenwriters.

Further separating professional and amateur screenwriters is that professionals are usually represented by a [[talent agency]]. These screenwriter-specific employment agencies work to handle the business side of the screenwriting job, typically taking on legal, financial, and other important representative roles for the screenwriter.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Bielby |first1=William T. |last2=Bielby |first2=Denise D. |date=February 1999 |title=Organizational Mediation of Project-Based Labor Markets: Talent Agencies and the Careers of Screenwriters |url=http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000312249906400106 |journal=American Sociological Review |language=en |volume=64 |issue=1 |pages=64–85 |doi=10.1177/000312249906400106 |issn=0003-1224}}</ref> These professional screenwriters rarely work for free.

There are a legion of would-be screenwriters who attempt to enter the [[film industry]], but it often takes years of trial and error, failure, and gritty persistence to achieve success. In ''Writing Screenplays that Sell'', Michael Hague writes, "Screenplays have become, for the last half of [the twentieth] century, what the [[Great American Novel]] was for the first half. Closet writers who used to dream of the glory of getting into print now dream of seeing their story on the big or small screen."<ref name=Hauge>{{cite book |last=Hauge |first=Michael |title=Writing Screenplays That Sell |year=1991 |publisher=HarperPerennial |isbn=9780062725004 |url=https://archive.org/details/writingscreenpla00haug_0 |url-access=registration}}</ref>