There have been a lot of good posts about writing on HN in the past month. Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851957 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1851526, I decided to try to write my own screenplay a few weeks back since I had never written in this style before. I found it to be an interesting exercise and it really helped me think through character and plot a lot more than I ever have with other types of writing. Given my experience writing this screenplay in the last month, I might also add to the list of swombat's [excellent] suggestions that you should practice writing different styles, whether it's poetry, screenplays, research papers, short stories, etc. Each one of these require different skill sets. I'd also add that just as reading a lot helps you write, the converse is true too. Writing regularly enriches your reading experiences.

If anyone's interested, I wrote a screenplay for South Park, partly to see what it was like to write a screenplay and partly to see if I could use SEO instead of the traditional process to get a screenplay picked up by a major network. Here's it is: http://www.scribd.com/doc/44671533/Underground-South-Park. I was thinking of hosting it on posterous or making a small wordpress site to put it up and see if I could drive people to it that way. Suggestions and advice welcome!