We all love watching movies. A good film takes you on a journey of adventure and self-discovery. Watching and re-watching classic films like Taxi Driver, Casablanca, or Titanic is what inspired us to become screenwriters in the first place. If you write in a particular genre, it’s important to watch all the current and past films in your genre. It’s also good to read books about screenwriting or take classes. But the one thing many screenwriters tend to overlook is the importance of reading screenplays.
We usually think of Shakespeare as one of the most uniquely gifted writers of all time. But the truth is that very few of his stories are "original" in our sense of the word. In fact, only two of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays have no known source. The rest were stolen -- that's right, stolen -- from specific, identifiable sources.
Many of us have a romantic vision of writing, but the truth is that writing is often slow, deliberate, painstaking work. We put one word after another. There's no way around: if you're a writer, you'll probably face writer's block at some point, and you'll be forced to find a way work through it. So let's think about some places to find inspiration if/when you get stuck.