Can You Really Teach Screenwriting?

Nature versus nurture

Years ago I was invited to lecture at a screenwriting craft conference sponsored by the Writers Guild at the UCLA Conference Center at beautiful Lake Arrowhead in the mountains high above Los Angeles. There were several practitioners and educators offering presentations. The guy preceding me, an under-loved, overfed, burned out and embittered used-to-be successful TV writer told the audience that screenwriting cannot be taught.

Writers can learn screenwriting solely on their own, he asserted. They can only teach themselves. Beware of the screenwriting gurus, he cautioned, traipsing up and back across the country and around the world holding seminars. Avoid also the ever increasing library of books on screenwriting.

Forget, finally, about the academic programs purporting to train writers. Higher learning in America, the speaker averred, has devolved into nothing more than a retail operation. Institutions of learning increasingly embrace a business model these days wherein they refer to students as customers. They offer whatever happens at the moment to be selling. Right now film education is hot; hence the surge of screenwriting courses and programs on college campuses.

Screenwriting education, he insisted, is a shell game, a fraud, a hoax, a hustle, a con, a scam.