The papers are full of the many thousands of graduates who will be on the dole, being sent off on gap years and generally finding that the recession is not a nice place to be.
For scriptwriters there are even bigger problems: with the demise of soaps like Brookside, Family Affairs, Crossroads (RIP!) and The Bill cutting to one hourly episode per week, where is a chap or girl to cut their teeth?
Doctors is swamped, the BBC Writers’ Academy only takes 8 particpants per year, yet the universities and film schools are graduating ever-increasing numbers of students.
The Guardian editorial (29 July) says it is ‘…temping to sympathise with Kingsley Amis who warned that “more will mean worse”’ (talking of increasing numbers of university students).
I don’t think more alone will mean worse; but I think that the changing times require changing curricula. It might now almost be negligent to continue teaching the same coursework in the same way, given the extreme changes in the working environment that scriptwriting students will be going into once they graduate.
‘Being a scriptwriter’ now requires being able to write for on-line as well as the screen. It should also mean knowing how to write prose, from novels to greetings cards. I have always believed that there was a fundamental conceptual fallacy in courses with the word ‘scriptwriting’ or even ‘creative writing’ in them.
What we do not seem to emphasize enough, and what I believe we should be teaching, is storytelling. The format – novel, feature film script, TV series episodes, on-line drama in 5 minute segments – also needs to be learned, but only when the storytelling ability has been proved.
And where do you prove it? I do not believe it is best learned in the classroom, but out in the real world. As Kate Harwood, Head of Series and Serials at the BBC said in her interview with TwelvePoint (watch out for it later in the month): “It’s very difficult for people to get what I call ‘flying hours’ because, in the end, as a writer you can do a tremendous amount on your own, but you can’t get beyond a certain stage if you don’t participate in the process. If you want to be a professional television writer you’ve got to see your work produced and that is the only way you really learn.”
So not only do you learn best by doing, but in the present recession having a second string to a graduate’s bow is essential. This could be making cocktails, but how much better if it were a working knowledge and experience in the industry that they hope to write for.
Film editing is a brilliant way to learn to tell stories on screen; there are excellent vocational courses for that as well as for directing and many other aspects of working in film or television. The courses for writers seem stuck largely in non-vocational land, where theory and history seems to take precedence over the real world.
The Guardian editorial was focused on the fact that the Labour government, having encouraged hundreds of thousands of students to take up higher education, is now going to hit them with greatly increased fees. That is a fund-raising trick not even Margaret Thatcher dreamt up.
Tags: Graduates, Kate Harwood, screenwriting degrees, university fees, Writers’ Academy
So true. I loved my time at Bournemouth and had plenty of time to *learn stuff* but by the time I came out I was still wet behind the ears… Learnt far more *on the job* script reading and on the corporate jobs I got just after graduating. As I always say to my Bang2writers – if you can afford the time AND money, scriptwriting courses are great for learning within a safe environment. But I’m not so sure anyone who does them is at an advantage per se, especially now every university seems to have a scriptwriting MA and the internet especially has such a wealth of info and groups/forums etc for writers to get together.
I agree and the shame is that universities and film schools do have the facility to teach other stuff that will be so much more valuable, but I suspect that only those who do change with the times will survive the devaluing of scriptwriting degrees because a higher proportion of their students will make it in the industry in the future.