Teaching Screenwriting Through Script Development: Looking Beyond the Screenplay

Very little has been written about screenwriting pedagogies in the context of formal education. While many of the hundreds of how-to books (and blogs) on the market espouse their own methods, they almost always speak to the indi- vidual writer or the paid-for script consultancy service (see Batty 2016; Bordino 2017). Macdonald (2004a) has raised similar concerns, namely that in a uni- versity setting, craft ‘theory’ is not enough: lecturers and tutors, and by asso- ciation their students, should have a more rigorous understanding of theory in order to understand their practice and, particularly in the case of research degrees (see Batty et al. 2016), to innovate practice through critical application. In this chapter, we focus on screenwriting pedagogy through the lens of script development, asking what we might glean from industry that helps our students to learn about aspects of writing for the screen beyond the screenplay itself. In other words, is script development a more viable pedagogy for teach- ing and learning the craft of screenwriting, one that exposes students to the wider world of industry and career ‘success’ than merely focusing on the writ- ing of a script?