Why is Screenwriting So inaccessible?

Why Access to Screenwriting is Fundamental

We live in an age of podcasting. Everyone you’ve ever loved has, at some point, been interviewed on a podcast. From listening, I’ve noticed a trend. Authors, when asked about where their love of writing began, would talk of reading Narnia, Harry Potter, or books by Enid Blyton under the covers as a child. Playwrights similarly would talk of discovering Shakespeare in high school English or Drama, which fed into Pinter, Stanislavski, and others.

But the one unifying thing all screenwriters say? “I had no idea this was a job you could do.” “I taught myself.” “I loved films, but had no idea people wrote them.”

It’s baffling to me.

How can we expect to nurture the next generation of screenwriters if nobody has been exposed to screenwriting at a formative age? The forms of novel writing, playwriting, and poetry ebb and flow at the whim and creativity of the artists and tastes of the time. Screenwriting is rigid, unmoving, and determined by conventions going back a century.

It’s fair to say that the industry of film and TV production is in a period of contraction. Part of the potential reason for that is an inability to change or grow. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that one obvious remedy to this is to get would-be writers reading at a young age.

The Result of Inaccessibility

Accessibility is the first step towards real progress of the art form. We are, like it or not, the product of our childhood. The best authors, poets, and playwrights all (with a few exceptions) spent their childhoods devouring the very art form they would later go on to master and push into new territories. The next generation are, right now, stood in Waterstones and other book and charity shops, perusing the shelves of their next source of inspiration. As their shelves fill, so too do their minds.

Just look at the influx of one-person shows after the success of Fleabag. Not every one of those writers watched Phoebe Waller-Bridge perform the show, but most of them have probably read the script. And they didn’t read it in order to write the next Fleabag, they read it because they love the form.

Without this level of accessibility, screenwriters only seem to have two paths into the craft.

The first is through later education. They may have, by some stroke of luck or investigation, discovered screenwriting as a career path and elected to study it in upper education. Rather than discovering the form through juvenile play, they discover it in prescriptive modules. Here’s how to structure. Here’s how to adapt. Here’s how to pitch. Here’s 30 books you must read or your career will fail.

The second is through trial and error. Again often occurring after leaving core education, writers will read up on the basics of screenwriting and try to apply their love of writing a play or novel to the format of a screenplay. The resulting script, by definition, then reads as a book or play, not as a script. They then take it out, face rejection and harsh notes, and through sheer pigheadedness, hone their craft into the exact same product as is produced by those who committed to the education.

There’s no sense of play.

We are all, by definition, shoehorned into a system as old as filmmaking, which is only a century or so old. Some are able to wriggle free, making wild and creative works of visual art, but on the whole we are discovering this medium through education later in life.

The only way we really have to learn the form in childhood is through watching films. That’s great, but the only thing we really absorb from that as a craft is dialogue. Dialogue is the only part of a film we register as being written. For that reason, writers like Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino are celebrated as some of the best screenwriters of our time. But at his core, Sorkin is a playwright, and Tarantino draws much of his inspiration from those early, dialogue heavy films written by writers who also grew up on theatre.

To invigorate the form for the next generation, we need to make screenplays accessible to them to enjoy. We need writers to, when interviewed, say “I read The Devil Wears Prada as a kid and fell in love.” As I see it, there’s two main ways to rectify this.

The problem: Bookshops

I love going to Waterstones. Do I ever buy anything? If I can. But perusing is half the fun. The store in central Cardiff, upstairs above the front door, there’s a whole section labelled ‘Drama’. Shelves and shelves of Shakespeare. At least three versions of Fleabag, half a shelf dedicated to Alan Bennet, and a whole host of other plays. But there’s no scripts. There’s no Jurassic Park, no Challengers, and absolutely no Aaron Sorkin.

That’s not because the scripts don’t exist. They absolutely do. But unlike plays, they’re treated like a specialist interest exclusively available online or to be delivered. It may seem silly in a world that lives on the internet, but by omitting these texts in physical bookstores, writers are missing out on that oldest and most noble of bookshop experiences: stumbling on a gem.

Okay, the appetite likely isn’t there right now, but imagine how well a Project: Hail Mary script would sell with the movie in theatres. As Disclosure Day approaches, copies of the consolidated works of David Koepp may not fly off the shelves, but they’ll be in more hands and homes than they otherwise would be. As time goes by, and more people read and recommend screenplays to their writer friends (or just friend, friends), the library can expand until there’s a whole new ‘drama’ section the next shelf down packed with cinematic gold.

Not to mention the return stores will see when panicked family members buy last minute gifts for their niece or nephew who “likes that sort of thing.”

The problem: Schools

The main way, the best way, and maybe the only way to improve accessibility to screenwriting is to put scripts in schools. On the curriculum.

I know, we all eventually hated reading Of Mice and Men, and The Importance of Being Ernest isn’t for everyone. But it is for some. And we all learned something from the experience of reading and performing those texts. They cemented themselves in our brains to the extent that, on drunken nights out in our early 20s, we likely all gathered at some pub or smoking area to discuss which plays and books we read in high school and what we thought about them. More to the point, writers the country over cite the texts they read at school as part of their journey to becoming a writer.

By being on the curriculum, scriptwriting will become boring. And by being boring, young people will find new ways to make it interesting. In cases like Fleabag, that manifested in a hyper sexual one person show that changed the face of theatre for a decade. Almost all innovation has come from young people coming into conflict with their stuffy old teachers or a culture that tells them “no”. By getting a scriptwriting education in early, we’re actually causing a positive seismic shift in the form that will help it to endure for another century.

Also, let’s be fair, it’d be fun spending a term jumping around the drama hall pretending to be Iron Man.

The Solution: Licensing

This solution may be completely impossible, but I think it will work. Every year, high schools up and down the country put on a “school play” or “school musical”. Companies license out a full script to schools to perform, introducing students to the full production process, from casting to read through to live performance.

Why, in the year of our lord 2026, are we not doing the same with film scripts? Why are schools not putting on movie nights where students have made a full episode of Waterloo Road? Why are university students not gathered around discussing the time they made a full Doctor Who adventure in Year 9?

Doing a full feature may be impossible, given the fact that kids do need to attend classes and get an “education”, but there’s no reason why short films and TV episodes can’t be licensed out in the same way as theatre productions to teach young people not only how to read a script, but how the full production system works.

Will they be any good? Maybe. But that’s not the point. The point of the school musical isn’t to tour it around the country, it’s to help students aim for greatness and experience the reward of that labour. For future writers, there’s a whole host of opportunities to learn the craft in this process. When they see how the script translates from script to camera to edit to showcase, it can only make their future writing that much better.

Not to mention, going on a tangent here, the fact that the licensed script may also come with sheet music the way the musicals do, which gives music departments an opportunity to be involved, creating a whole other benefit of nurturing the next generation of film composers.

As the quiet kid in my year, the school musicals gave me the opportunity to learn how to project my voice, to be confident, to express myself. I can think of a few kids that would have massively benefited from the opposite, from learning the quiet, deliberate, considered approach of film and TV acting.

Of course, there is the cost to consider, but let’s be honest, even that’s not a massive issue anymore. Students and teachers alike spend their breaks and lunches glued to their smart phones, and lapel mics cost £20 on Amazon.

Focusing on the writer, having access to a full script, absolutely destroyed with highlights, notes, annotations, and amendments is such a valuable experience. The script in their hand has been produced already. All they need to do is open Netflix or iPlayer and there it is. Even so, changes need to be made. A line of dialogue doesn’t work in a particular actors mouth. Settings need to be changed for access reasons. Nothing is sacred, yet everything is. All the while, perhaps subconsciously, some of those writers are thinking of ways the scriptwriting format isn’t working, and are devising ways to change it and push it forward. In looking for those solutions, they’ll be creating stories of their own. Stories designed, from the very start, as screenplays. They will think in film, devise in film, and write for film.

It’s crazy to me thinking about what a massive shift such a simple change would make.

Put more scripts in more hands, and the industry will take care of itself. The younger the hands, the brighter the future.

It really is that simple.