2.Main Content
Script Writing Training – what is it good for?
Mon, 21 Jul 2008
Script Factory co-director Lucy Scher argues that Screenwriting Training that prioritises individual creativity and doesn’t focus on craft is likely to be popular - but isn’t likely to produce good screenwriters.
“Every year for many years now I have been invited to lead a week-long screenwriting workshop, with the screenwriter Paul Fraser, in one of the Arvon Foundation’s beautiful country houses. These houses have been bequeathed by famous writers for the sole use of providing a tranquil and conducive environment for writers to teach writing and share their experience with the next generation of writers.
One year, one of the participants was a pharmacist who was looking to become a screenwriter. (This career shift towards writing is not so unusual.) She attended all the taught sessions, all her individual meetings and did all the preparation and writing work that we asked of them. At the end of the week she asked, without irony “when will I start getting paid?”
“For what?” I said.
“For my screenwriting?” she answered, and then in to my pause she added; “the pharmaceutical training is 6 months before you get given a placement and begin to be paid.”
I know you are thinking this is a ridiculous comparison but whenever anyone says something to me that is so unexpected I don’t have an answer, I think it is always worth pondering.
How it is that one can learn for example, to advise not to take pain-killers on an empty stomach and to take no more than 2 every 4 hours, but can’t learn how to construct a scene? Or create thematic unity? Or understand structure and on and on… Screenwriting training regularly comes under fire for failing to deliver screenwriters. Is it the training or the trainees or is it something else?
I should pin my colours to the mast and say that I am so happy we live in a democracy and I stand by the right of everyone to pursue their dreams and make their lives as prosperous and creatively fulfilled as possible in whichever ways appeal. Therefore it follows that everyone has the right to seek training in screenwriting whether or not they have quantifiable ability or even the desire to become a working screenwriter. So let’s accept the possibility that some if not most trainees may not be up to the job and there is one answer as to why screenwriting training is perceived to fail.
There is a reverence in our culture to creativity and a tendency to allow writers carte blanche in pursuit of their voice. I have said, many a time and oft, that new screenwriters are terribly disadvantaged by comparison to our new novelists, playwrights, poets etc because screenwriting is not studied at school as a matter of course. Therefore when we provide training that allows new screenwriters to find their voice they are often doing so without any grasp of the basic craft skills. Shut up that voice and learn the craft. First.
I am in awe and inspired by the Chinese film school methods (these are in fact unconfirmed but so what) where students are made to copy out scripts. Literally, word for word, line by line, like we did in English composition when learning grammar, meaning and sentence construction. I suggest that our new screenwriters will learn more about scripts in copying by hand Billy Elliot or Little Miss Sunshine than probably anything else.
In my view Screenwriting Training that prioritises individual creativity and does not focus on craft is likely to be popular but unlikely to produce good screenwriters. There is no point having creativity without craft skills and this is a known fact in every other genre. A splodge of paint, a burst of movement, random musical notes picked out on a keyboard, do not make art. But here lies another conundrum, namely, free-market economics. If screenwriting courses proclaiming to help you find your voice and be in touch with your creativity are easy to sell, then who wouldn’t sell them and equally, why not? My dream curriculum is a series of highly structured lessons, over the best part of two years, in pursuit of an understanding of screenwriting craft through careful contemplation, examination and analysis of scripts, undertaken by very bright people… see what I mean. It may not sell very well.
The general trend has been to make screenwriting courses relevant by creating connections to the industry. In truth this means a guest speaker, or a mentor who will read a script, or perhaps a work-placement in a distribution company so writers can really see the reality of the business. (Which of course is admin.). Guest speakers and mentors have enormous value in sharing experience, giving insight into industrial process, offering faith to never give it up (or the reason to give it up). This is a great contribution to the process of general learning, but I am not sure that it helps writers to learn the craft.
How many scenes are there, averagely, in a feature script? What is the function of a scene? Writers should be able to identify the function and purpose of every scene in the script and know why it is there in terms of the overall meaning, including the way in which it is intended to affect the audience, and how it is achieving this. If writers don’t know the answers to these questions how can they prepare and organise the information in the story effectively? (Which is not to say that even then an audience will eventually receive a story is as intended, as a zillion other factors will come into play).
Story is craft too. I have a meeting coming up with a new writer about his script, which states it is ‘based on a true story’ and my first question will be: what do you understand by story? I want to hear that he knows there needs to be a purpose; that there has to be something at stake for the character, for the audience, and ideally both; that the ending has some integrity and connection to the beginning. This example of the extent of the writer’s ignorance sounds extreme but it isn’t. It is very boringly common. The answers to these questions shouldn’t create hesitancy, these are the pain killers of screenwriting.
Craft can be taught but it may not be learned because learning in this context requires application, and the talent to both learn and apply is not distributed fairly. Screenwriters need an awful lot of talent to succeed.
Some of the factors that combine to ensure that script writing training doesn’t produce an abundance of good screenwriters and films are, I suggest, trainees that may not want to be screenwriters, trainees who are not talented enough to be screenwriters, and training for new writers that prioritises creativity over craft.
However, in response to the critics of screenwriting training it has to be said… if there was a way to guarantee to groom screenwriters to write fantastic films surely to goodness we would just do it. It ain’t easy."
Lucy Scher is one of The Script Factory's co-directors. Read more about The Script Factory's craft - and other - training programmes by .
A version of this article will appear in the new edition of TwelvePoint.com – the newly launched online version of ScriptWriter Magazine.