Much like moviemaking, it's a combination of skills working together to create a whole.
Choosing what happens in the story is a different skill than imagining what happens on screen.
Imagining what happens on screen is a different skill than deciding how to express it on the page.
Throw in dialogue, structure, human behavior, and the ability to control the reader's experience, and you have at least half a dozen unique skills that all fall under one category: screenwriting.
That's not even mentioning pitching and navigating development!
No wonder many of us throw up our hands, thinking, "I don't know what I'm doing!"
After writing professionally for 27 years and teaching for almost as long, I have grown to see talent very differently.
I think of talent now as a starting point.
And each of us has a different starting point for understanding, processing, and executing all the skills involved in screenwriting.
It's where we begin. Practice, mentoring, and training take us from there.
I am an exponentially better writer than I was thirty years ago. I am more experienced and more confident now.
But if you put me side by side with my younger self, it would appear as if I was more talented.
This is because much of what we consider talent is simply processing certain crucial things at a faster pace.
And like anything, that can be developed. The mind gets better at it the more it does it.
Emerging screenwriters ask themselves, am I any good at this?
But often, it's the wrong question.
The right question is: are they willing to work hard enough to get good at this?