For aspiring screenwriters, navigating the endless litany of rules and guides that are available in this day and age can feel overwhelming. It harkens back to that old Hollywood chestnut: "Everyone's a writer." So many people out there have their own success story, their own advice for writers trying to get their stories told, it can often seem like white noise.

Enter Jason McKinnon, a guest contributor here at ScreenCraft, and founder of the popular website Screenwritingspark.com, an aggregator of screenwriting content culled from articles and websites across the Internet. He has conducted a meta-analysis of the 15 most common rules appearing in these articles, dubbed The 15 Platinum Rules of Screenwriting. He reviews each at length, but here's the Cliff's Notes version:

1. Tell A Great Story

2. Master the Format

3. No Stage Directions

4. Hide Your Exposition

5. Get In Late, Get Out Early

6. Your Audience Matters

7. Obstacles

8. Clarity

9. Your World, Your Characters

10. Less Is More

11. Write What You Know

12. Have Something To Say

13. Entertain

14. Write, Rewrite, Repeat

15. Write Everyday

Conspicuously missing from this amalgamated list, however, is perhaps the most important rule for aspiring writers: Read! Oftentimes screenwriting services are all too ready to tell writers how to write that they ignore the other side of the coin. At ScreenCraft, we want to help you succeed; and we're here to tell you that you cannot be a good writer unless you're a good reader. Read good scripts, bad scripts, produced scripts, unproduced scripts—read everything you can get your hands on. How else do you expect to be able to judge your own writing unless you can hop into the reader's chair? The more scripts you read, the more a pattern will begin to emerge, and you'll catch onto the beat of what makes a good screenplay.

Simply Scripts has one of the most impressive catalogues of downloadable screenplays available for free on the Internet. They have organized their archive in terms of Oscar-winners, Top-100 Lists, Unproduced, and so on. Many of their titles even include various draft versions in addition to the final production drafts, which will prove invaluable to writers wanting to perfect their own craft. Screenwriting, after all, is rewriting.

As for rules, perhaps the Golden Rule of Screenwriting is this: It takes a lot of work. Nothing comes easy in this business. Recall the words of Tom Hanks' character, Jimmy Dugan, describing playing baseball in the big leagues from A League of Their Own: "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard—is what makes it great."