On teaching screenwriting

I love teaching screenwriting. I do not love teaching playwriting or fiction or Eng Comp. What's the difference?

Screenwriting is not really about "writing" in the usual sense. Screenwriting is about film storytelling. The key to good screenwriting is this, something that would be absurd to say about other forms of writing: don't let the writing get in the way of your story! This is what is meant by the often repeated directive, A screenplay is not a literary document; it is a blueprint for a movie.

What is nice about teaching screenwriting is that there is clear content, or at least content clearer and less ambiguous than other forms of writing. It's more objective than other forms of writing. If you write a screenplay with the same rhetoric you'd use to write a short story, or an essay, it can be demonstrated beyond a doubt that you are over-writing in a style inappropriate to screenwriting. And everyone starts out doing just this. So immediately all students can be shown what they are doing wrong and can improve at a basic technical level.

There are reallly 3 learning curves in screenwriting: learning the appropriate "minimalist" writing style; learning screenplay format; and learning film storytelling. The first two get you to the starting line. That is, producers don't give a hoot about your writing per se -- they assume you know what a screenplay is, a blueprint, and therefore will write accordingly. So the first two learning curves, if abused, are ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Indeed, whenever I'm a judge in a screenplay contest, I can eliminate half the entries on page one! This is shocking but true. How? Because the writer is writing like a novelist, not a screenwriter. Sometimes the page has such heavy text density you don't even have to read it. This is not what a screenplay "looks like", any more than a 4-line poem looks like a sonnet. You don't have to read it to know it's not a sonnet. So with the screenplay. A good screenplay is airy, lots of white space on the page, short sentences and (often even better) fragments, short paragraphs, what we call "a vertical read."

Screenwriting is not a writer's form. The best "writing" students usually have the biggest adjustment in my classes. Screenwriting is a storyteller's form.

I've worked in virtually every form of writing there is, and I think screenwriting is more "fun" than any of them. It's fun because you can do so much with so little, because the agony of word choice is not as extreme as in other forms of writing. This is not a rhetoric-driven form but an action-driven form. You get to tell big stories with few words and don't lose sleep over what those specific words are.

Since virtually every student starts writing screenplays the same way they write anything else, as teacher I immediately have concrete advice for improvement. There is concrete subject matter here, more than subjective opinion (which comes in soon enough with storytelling issues). If students pay attention, they can greatly improve their skills in the first few weeks -- which gets them to the starting line. Now the real work begins, which is storytelling. Which is dramatic structure, William Goldman said that screenwriting is about "structure, structure and structure" and who would argue with him?

It's a joy when a student learns that sometimes in a screenplay a sentence fragment is more powerful than an elegant sentence!