Why Write Scripts?

You might have a story planned, but you view it like a TV show: scenes appear in your mind, and often in non-chronological order. The story is half images and half dialogue, and you struggle to get it into workable prose. What you haven't realized is that a screenplay would therefore suit the story a whole lot better.

There's also the possibility that you think of a story in terms of characters talking in a room. If so, your story idea may be play material, suitable for theater.

The best reason to write a script is that it best suits your story. But be warned that if you usually write other genres, you may find it harder to keep the healthy distance from your "baby" that's needed to avoid frustration. Screenplays are usually hacked and mangled by the time they're made into movies—if they're made into movies—and it's not uncommon for a director's visualization of a play to vary from the writer's mental image.

Scripts can also, with extreme rarity, be lucrative. Much more often, scriptwriting can be good practice, teaching you why you usually write the way you do. (For example, I used to think my stories were too dialogue-heavy. Writing a play taught me how wrong I was.) If you're stuck in trying to organize a trough of ideas about a story and can't figure out the most important details, writing a script can also teach you just what can be cut.

You may choose to write a script because it suits your story, because you think that way, or to work on your writing overall.