What Genre Screenplay Should I be Writing?

If you write horrors, should you only write horrors? What if you write comedies, are you stuck writing comedies for the rest of your career?

Hollywood is tough town to navigate. Buyers and producers need everything as simple as possible, so the more they are confused, the harder it is to sell them something, or someone.

Imagine going to a car dealership. Lets say you want an econimcal car that is going to get you great gas mileage. Well, you aren’t going to go to the Ferrari dealer, or you aren’t going to go look at the SUV’s. You will know, pretty much, the range of cars you are going to look for.

 Hollywood works very much the same way. When a studio is looking for a comedy writer, they know the writer’s list in that genre and will go after them.

So here is my advice to you up and coming screenwriters. Figure out the genre you like the best. At the beginning, it is ok to experiment in different styles. Try comedies, try thrillers. Which one did you get the best response with? When you are first starting out, nobody knows who you are, so you can get away with wrting whatever you want. However, if you are lucky enough to get sale, you need to stick to that genre…for a while.

If you sell a thriller, everyone around town is going to be thinking of you as a thriller writer. If all of a sudden, you write a comedy, the town will be confused, and not only that, your agent or manager will have a hard time pitching you. You need to capitalize on your sell, and write another thriller to get your career flowing.

There does come a point when you can change again. Once you are successful, and have sold a few scripts and have worked on a few assignments, then you can write another genre. Actually, it is helpful for your agent or manager to do this, because you can be put up for more projects. But remember, you should only do this once you are established…or once your career in one genre has fizzled.

 To sum it up, if you have no sales and are completely new, play around with different genres. Once you find out what you are good at, stick to that for some time until you have become established. And then feel free to try other genres out.