Very funny Dave!

Carson's list is just his per peeves...

Great writers are great writers, good writers are good writers, mediocre writers are mediocre and poor writers are poor.

Great writers can tell a poor writer how they do it, but the poor writer will never be able to elevate their own work to such a level.

Quoted from DustinBowcot Great writers are great writers, good writers are good writers, mediocre writers are mediocre and poor writers are poor. Great writers can tell a poor writer how they do it

Except they never do. I'm starting to suspect they don't know themselves how they got it. I mean how they achieved their greatness.

Quoted from ericdickson I'm just saying is all.  Peace and quiet equals more writing time.  I'm sure I'll meet another woman soon and ruin my life all over again.   But for now...

Now you have no one to blame. Tha's scary.

Quoted from DustinBowcot Great writers are great writers, good writers are good writers, mediocre writers are mediocre and poor writers are poor. Great writers can tell a poor writer how they do it, but the poor writer will never be able to elevate their own work to such a level.

Perhaps, but even great writers started out not so great. While few poor writers will go on to become great writers, not everyone needs to be. Mediocre scripts are getting made all the time.

I've been helping poor and mediocre writers for years. Almost none have gone on to be great writers. But more than a few have gone on to get work, get scripts optioned, or at least show marked improvement and are no longer poor writers.

But the majority of them have become better storytellers and know more about writing marketable scripts. And that's my goal, because those mediocre writers that are getting movies made are telling good stories and know the business.

Stepen King broke it down in his book on writing. The top tier writers are born that way and all we can do is enjoy their work. Another class of people just can't write and there is no way to really teach them to become good enough that the improvement matters. But there is a vast group in the middle that through hard work can become good enough to do something with their work. He considers himself in that middle group. So if you're somewhere in that middle group it's worth working at the craft of learning to tell a story, and it's valuable getting feedback.

I'm still going to keep reading through the ones I missed. My method during the contest was to pick one from the bottom of the view list(other than the one I was told might be Bert's, lol). I'll try to give notes the writer might find helpful.

I believe that the quality of writing can be taught and can be improved over time with enough practice.

Great storytelling is something else entriely. It's an instinctive part of gifted, highly imaginitive individuals that simply cannot be taught, yet it has to be fed for it to flourish.  

I've seen writers who can astound me with the creativeness of their words and the pictures they can describe vividly, yet they are bad storytellers. There's no originality, it's not griping, quite often it just doesn't make sense. And they never get any better at it no matter how hard they try. They just don't have that particular gift.

Vice versa, someone who isn't particualry versitile in embelshing their writing can have the reader hooked. J.K. Rowling has been critisied by 'other writers' for not being adapt at writing skillfully, yet her Harry Potter stories have enthralled the world.

While there are writers on the lower end of the spectrum that won't improve their storytelling, I do think there is a group in the middle than can and will. While some things are harder to teach, a huge part of storytelling is technique. Creating questions the audience wants answered(JJ Abrams mystery box), avoiding cliches, using tropes, improving dialog. Or finding your voice, for example by adding humor. Rowling used tropes like a master story teller. To a degree, that can be learned. Obviously it's better if the storyteller has an instinct for it, but improvement happens.