Horizon

It's hard to say. I found some of my screenwriting classes in university to be extremely helpful, not just in terms of screenwriting, but in terms of my writing in general. That said, it was one particular class which was done writing-workshop style. But the mentorship those courses offer is often helpful too.

That said, I'm not quite so impressed by the 'pick a card' school of writing demonstrated here.

Arthur Cravan (Dadaist), 1914: "I am astonished that some crook has not had the idea of opening a writing school".

By the way, everyone noticed that the site I linked to has 32 hours of video of Butler in the act of writing a short story, right?

Reminds me, I took a screenwriting class myself a long time ago. The guy teaching it had like third billing on a forgotten Hollywood film of the '80s, but I have to say he was a smart person and worth talking to in a general sort of way. I came to the conclusion that worth-talking-to-in-a-general-sort-of-way-ness was about the most you could hope for from such a class, and that while this has a certain value, it's really something that people should go out and find for themselves rather than pay for.

The one practical advantage to the class was that it motivated a lazy person like myself to work more than I ordinarily would, but that, again, is something I'm embarrassed to pay for.

Great quote, Alan. Someone invented Dadaism, after all.

Did they explain what the hell a "character arc" is or why film scripts always have those huge margins?

Ah, well, in the screenwriting world people usually don't ask so many questions. You spend most of your time learning forms the justification for which is not supposed to concern you, because the people who expect them, and who you are trying to please, aren't much interested in your opinions. Kind of a depressing business.

My own screenwriting class was, as I said, a writing workshop, which I thought was the best class I took in my misspent undergraduate career. Teaching was done through group feedback and discussion and it totally stimulated me.

Would that the actual industry be so rewarding, alas no.

As for the margins, I think it's because now people use it for guesstimating length based on page count, by the concept that a page of properly formatted script averages out to about a minute of screen time.

Well, cynicism aside, I have to say that I think screenwriting classes make much more sense than general creative writing classes, since the screenwriting business is so hung up on obscure protocols and full of people who failed in the business propagating weird structural formulae and what not.