'Nobody knows anything'

‘Can scriptwriting be taught?’ is a thorny perennial for those who attempt to teach it and creative writing of all kinds. The fact that the question is even asked shows that the discipline is perceived differently from other subjects; teachers in the sciences and elsewhere in the arts are not similarly vexed by whether or not their topic is teachable. Tim Massey looks at the peculiarities of scriptwriting and creative writing in general that pose this dilemma.

The traditional pedagogical approach is to teach a body of knowledge on which students can be examined. As well as showing how far candidates have taken a body of knowledge on board, examination necessarily demonstrates that it is also possible to teach it to them. Scriptwriting eludes this model of teaching and testing because of its lack of ‘right’ answers: if students are to be examined on the quality of their scripts, there must be objective standards by which to evaluate them. If it were possible to set out such criteria, film and television industry executives would not find it so difficult to locate quality screenplays to produce and would be assured of garnering hits by simply green-lighting those that met the established benchmarks.

The huge subjectivity inherent in picking winners led William Goldman to his famous, capitalised conclusion that ‘NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING’ in the movie industry. In an arena in which nobody knows anything, teaching is clearly impossible.

As Julian Friedmann suggests in his editorial to the March 2007 edition of ScriptWriter, scriptwriting best suits an autodidactic approach with wannabe writers learning to write by doing so. In an essay on learning to write, Barry Turner recalls the sottish advice of the American playwright and novelist Sinclair Lewis who, appearing at a university seminar for aspiring writers, asked his audience who amongst them wanted to be a writer. When he received a substantial showing of hands, Lewis demanded, ‘Then why the hell aren’t you at home writing?’

The much-maligned Robert McKee (who some cast as a purveyor of a primrose pathway to scriptwriting success) agrees that it’s nose to the grindstone when learning to write: ‘It takes ten or more years of adult life [...] and often as many screenplays written and unsold to master this demanding craft. [I]f you were to take the same hard work and creativity that goes into a decade of unsold screenplays and apply it to a normal profession, you could retire before you see your first script on the screen.’ If McKee’s timescale for success is correct, a screenwriting career is vocational more in the religious sense than in the occupational one.

Malcolm Bradbury, a pioneer in creative writing teaching in higher education and founder of the UK’s first MA in the subject at the University of East Anglia, concluded that this calling was something that couldn’t be taught: ‘I have no doubt that the essential qualities needed by the writer are independent of anything that can be taught. There has first, I believe, to be a passionate motivation. Writing is a solitary, obscure, frequently disappointing way of pursuing a life, and it must be driven by profound commitment.’

The question of what drives writers to devote themselves to lives of solitude, obscurity and frequent disappointment is a can of worms that I’m going to leave unopened here, but the point is that the determination needed to find success as a writer is what divides the diehards from the dilettantes. Any would-be writer expecting a screenwriting course to be the threshold to a lucrative scriptwriting career will be disillusioned because the onus is on the budding writer to learn the craft rather than to be taught it.

Any educative process does, of course, require active learning. Even the most gifted teacher would be confounded by a resolutely passive student who imagined that skills and knowledge might somehow be downloaded into the mind without any effort on the learner’s part. The activities that do lend themselves to being taught with minimal student initiative are naturally low-grade skills with very well-defined, predictable outcomes. It is, for example, possible to teach students to use Final Draft with little effort from them because the ability to turn out perfectly formatted scripts with the software is just a matter of familiarity with its workings. The use of a word processor can be dinned into ardent technophobes by repeated demonstration and practical exercises, but the ability to use it to write saleable screenplays requires pro-active learning.

Offering courses in scriptwriting has the unintended implication that students can expect to be trained to write quality screenplays in the same way that they can be trained to produce a well-presented script document. It seems to let aspiring writers off the hook of developing their writing skills through practice – why learn when you can be taught?

The misconception that both under- and postgraduate scriptwriting courses are vocational in the gainful employment sense blights both student expectations of the courses and the repute of the courses themselves. Universities are not in the business of offering glorified NVQs and insistence that a degree in scriptwriting ought to be the first rung on the ladder of a writing career is – to return to my original point – a way in which the subject is treated differently from other disciplines. Students taking English Literature, Geography, History, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, Pure Mathematics, Archaeology or Astral Physics are not automatically expected to pursue careers in their respective subjects, and much of the tension and scepticism surrounding scriptwriting degrees might be diffused if the direct vocational expectations were lifted and the subject was accepted, like those listed above, as a legitimate academic discipline.

Graduates of the University of Life, School of Hard Knocks, Faculty of Tedious Clichés will doubtless scuttle to adjectives like ‘effete’ and ‘ivory tower’ at the mention of the a-word, but a university education should equip its graduates with employment skills that are more flexible than those locked into a specific occupation.

In the mid-1980s I was interviewed for a place on the Media Production degree at the then Bournemouth Institute of Higher Education. I was asked why I wanted to take the course and replied, naively, that I hoped it would lead to a job in the media. ‘A degree doesn’t mean to say that you’re qualified for a particular job,’ the bad-cop interviewer snapped. ‘Well, what does it say?’ I demanded. ‘It says you’ve got a shit-detector mind,’ he retorted. At the time I thought that this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard but, having mellowed with age, I now feel that my slightly coprophiliac interrogator was right.

The aims for the Screenwriting honours degree at Southampton Solent University (listed in Craig Batty’s feature, ScriptWriter, March 2007) include the progressive development of ‘a range of transferable skills including study skills, independent judgment, cooperative attitudes and behaviours, responsibility, self-motivation and reflection’, and it is these kinds of adaptable abilities that academic study cultivates.

The composition of a screenplay tests its writer’s creative skills in generating ideas for the story and characters; analytical skills in structuring the plot; problem-solving abilities in finding ways to move the story on when it reaches an impasse; communicative skills in expressing ideas clearly and concisely; and the ability to work to deadlines as well as demonstrating vision and tenacity in pursuing a project from its conception to realisation. Such skills developed through screenwriting can be applied in other careers just as well as similar abilities progressed in the academic study of other disciplines.

Viewing the academic study of scriptwriting as a means of developing a range of transferable skills also overcomes some of the problems of assessment outlined above. If students turn in entirely derivative and cliché-ridden scripts, it’s possible to judge that they have not learnt to apply creative, critical, analytical and judgmental skills as well as they might. If they come up with screenplays that demonstrate originality and an innovative approach to storytelling, it’s possible to make a more favourable assessment. This doesn’t mean that grading screenplays can be reduced to ticking boxes, but it is at least a way of introducing some sort of evaluative objectivity.

Also, it does not follow that scripts that gain high marks as degree coursework will necessarily be saleable – that’s still in the realm of NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING – but students should demonstrate that they have far more than dabbled in developing their screenwriting skills to achieve at degree or postgraduate level.

The other factor to bear in mind when thinking about how far universities are in the business of training scriptwriters is that while they receive much of their funding from the state, universities operate ever more within a free market economy. The larger part of undergraduates’ course fees is paid by the government but, with the introduction of top-up fees and the abolition of student grants, they are increasingly self-funding, while many students at postgraduate level bear the entire cost of their study.

Universities must now compete with each other both nationally and internationally to win students and survive. This means that a university’s priority is to attract students (who are more discerning because they are spending their own money) to its courses, and so its product is its courses and not its graduates.

Screenwriting courses represent a potentially lucrative income stream because they are both popular and low maintenance, requiring little additional investment in available resources. To ensure their popularity they must certainly extend the hope that graduates will build writing careers, and arrays of glittering alumni are an advantage in marketing. Courses with track records of graduates working in the film and television industry can build on their reputations by becoming more selective as demand increases, recruiting only the most able students.

Newly-convened courses need to find other means of product differentiation, possibly by offering the tutelage of established screenwriters. (The idea that established screenwriters are necessarily successful screenwriting teachers is dubious – the best-known screenwriting theorists and teachers – Robert McKee, Syd Field, Christopher Vogler and Linda Seger – are not known for their screenwriting but the illusion persists.) Ultimately, university screenwriting courses are part of an industry that turns writers into consumers rather than creators.

The screenwriting services market is evidently larger and easier to penetrate than that for screenplays themselves. While screenwriters face selling their scripts in a buyers’ market with fierce competition and few customers, those offering screenwriting services can target anyone who thinks half-seriously about writing a screenplay. The plethora of courses, seminars, how-to books, holidays, magazines (it would be disingenuous to pretend that ScriptWriter magazine is not itself a product in this marketplace), software and script-reading services on offer forms a raft of enterprises vying for writers’ hard-earned (but probably not by writing) cash. [ScriptWriter editorial note: ScriptWriter is probably the only one of these which consistently says that scriptwriting may not be a rational career choice.]

The logical upshot of looking sceptically at this range of services is absolute insistence on the autodidactic approach. As many writers find success without formal education or training, it follows that those with talent can succeed without reference to those who seek to profit from their writing ambitions. They should not sign-up for courses, conferences or seminars, not buy how-to books or specialist software, cancel their subscriptions to writing magazines, and fire their literary agents. The truly gifted need not trouble themselves with the costly advice and instruction of others since they will learn by intuition alone and their talent will out.

The trouble with the ‘talent will out’ argument is that innate ability is not usually imbued with completely autonomous dynamism. In over a decade of leading workshop meetings with my writers’ group, Southwest Scriptwriters, I have seen highly talented writers get nowhere while those of lesser ability succeed. This is because gifted writers often have a particular skill – the ability to create well-drawn, three-dimensional characters or write sparkling, witty dialogue, perhaps – but this facility does not extend across the range of skills necessary to write a fully satisfying script.

The gifted can end up in thrall to their talent, willing to do only what comes naturally – building the characters, writing the dialogue – but reluctant to heed advice on developing the craft skills that will allow them to use their talent fully.

The less-gifted meanwhile learn to apply all the innate ability they can muster across all aspects of scriptwriting – narrative and structure as well as characterisation and dialogue – and, by listening to feedback from others, write saleable scripts. While there is a danger that writers can be educated into producing scripts that are all craft and no talent, the issue here is one of balance.

Ultimately, the responsibility for developing scriptwriting skills lies with the writer. While it’s important to realise that no course, class, seminar, conference, how-to book or magazine contains the elixir of screenwriting success, it’s also folly to believe that none of these has anything to offer. Picking those products that are most likely to be beneficial in a writer’s development is a matter of consumer choice. The principle of caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – applies as much to the choice of an educational or training course as it does to that of a washing machine.

The difference between white goods and education is that the consumer bears more responsibility for getting the most from education, and aspiring writers should take care in assessing what they are likely to achieve by working through a particular course before enrolling. Anyone attempting to embark on a screenwriting career is unlikely to remain convinced that it will prove an immediately lucrative vocation for very long, and those who persist bear all the risk of failure.

Tim Massey is a playwright and artistic director of Southwest Scriptwriters, Bristol’s leading group for writers of drama for all media (www.southwest-scriptwriters.co.uk). He holds an MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University, and won the Training And Performance Showcase (TAPS) Tenth Anniversary Drama Writer of the Year Award. www.timmassey.co.uk