Screenwriting is a performative act; that is to say that it is a matter of performance, and not of intent.  There are a lot of screenwriters that think of themselves as artists.  What becomes important to them as a product of this belief is focusing on artistic sensibilities and inspiration.  Horse twaddle.

Whether you’re a screenwriter cannot be decided by whether you write a screenplay, sell a screenplay, or loftily pursue the elevation of the art.  Being a screenwriter is about one thing, and that’s what you’ve got to prioritize over absolutely everything else: communicating with the audience.

“Oh, I knew that,” you’re thinking.

Well, hold on to your fancy leather pants, because I’m about to throw you for a loop. Communicating with the audience is SO vital to real screenwriting that it is more important to focus on whether and how you’re communicating with the audience than what you’re communicating to the audience.  The method is more important than the message.
“What?” You grab your chest – don’t think I can’t see the heart attack from here.

That’s right, I said it.  Stop being an Academy snob.  It doesn’t matter what you write.  It only matters how you write it.  A screenwriter ought to be able to write any story.  If you just “feel certain stories more than others,” is it wrong to write them?  No, absolutely not.  I would never discourage someone from writing something they’re passionate about.  I would, however, warn them that if they want it to sell, what they have to keep in mind AT ALL TIMES is that they cannot leave the audience behind.  Does the genre, in the end, really matter?  Only to the extent that some genres are easier than others to master.

Sometimes, when you’re writing a passion project, there’s a desire to take the audience somewhere they wouldn’t normally go.  You want to take them to the world you inhabit.  When properly done, this can be beautiful and moving.  But if you’re not paying attention to what you’re making the audience think and feel, it can be disastrous – they can simply refuse to go there with you.

Let’s take “Hound Dog” as an example.  I haven’t seen it.  I don’t want to see it.  I am solely going to judge this movie based on what I’ve heard about it (Referee says, “Fair play, since audiences do this, too”). The audience didn’t want to go see Dakota Fanning get raped.  They didn’t want to go there.  Why?  Because they had an intimation that it would make them feel party to child pornography.  The audience doesn’t want to feel like child pornographers.  Even child pornographers don’t want to feel like child pornographers.

What’s the problem? Graphic scenes, the kind that get Oscars for actors, have to have a certain element of nobility to them.  That’s all.  The audience is perfectly willing to go down in the gutter with you, but only if they’ll come up smelling like a rose.  “Crash” exemplifies this: it contains scenes of violent racism, but the point of the picture is that we cannot pretend racism no longer exists, thus it is an act of art to force us to confront them head on, and we can revel in our superiority for participating in such an act.

My point here is in saying, “Pay attention!” If you want to create a moving script, you must absolutely know it to be moving.  There can be no part which you are uncertain about whether it might be boring or not possess the effect you intended it to.  It is easy to know this in say, a horror movie; it is more difficult in a drama or a comedy. But it’s absolutely impossible to know if you’re only concerned about the idea of screenplay as Art.