UPenn vs NYU for Aspiring Writer

Abcde11
Sun, 20 Apr 2014 06:46:54 +0000

In terms of a career? These schools have no benefit. None at all.

I can’t speak towards fiction very much. I suspect that using an ivy league education as the hook to a query letter could, in some cases, work, but only minimally (and is that “hook” really worth $100,000? - short answer: no, it isn’t). I can speak towards screenwriting however. I can tell you with absolute confidence that no one gives a damn about what school you went to, or even if you have a degree in writing. They care about one thing and one thing only: quality.

If a producer or a studio executive has two scripts pass by his desk, one good and written by an NYU grad, the other amazing and written by a dropout, the dropout will always win. I repeat. The dropout. Will. Always. Win. One Quentin Tarantino - who dropped out of high school and worked in a DVD rental store - is worth more than 1,000 subpar screenwriting graduates combined. Every single time. Hollywood cares about artistic integrity on some level, but there’s one thing they care about more. Money. No matter how hard you may have worked to get a degree in creative writing, it doesn’t amount to squat if they feel like YOU can’t make money for THEM. It’s not necessarily fair. But it’s the way things go. I assume the cards play out very, very similarly in novel writing.

I beg you to at least give a thought to skipping out on NYU or Penn (at least at first). It’s a joke. Waving a piece of paper in someone’s face won’t convince them you’re a good writer. Only one thing and one thing only will do that, and that’s a manuscript or a screenplay. As long as you can put good words on a page, you’ll be paid well. As long as you can tell a great story that’ll captivate an audience (and get them to pay for it), no one in either industry cares who you are; you could be a talking dog for Christ’s sake. Truly, I’m being honest here.

There’s a bit of a sad truth here that not many people are brave enough to say, and this is it: while your writing can be improved ten fold by practicing and studying, a portion of it really is up to luck. Even if it’s a small portion, some of the equation will always be out of your hands. There are writers who pay big bucks to attend expensive colleges and writing retreats, and they can’t write for (pardon my French) ■■■■. They’re very, very noble for trying, but for these people, failure is unfortunately inevitable. Then, there are writers out there who write on napkins in coffee shops, and without any practice or formal training whatsoever, they pen the next Harry Potter or Pulp Fiction (I’m using J.K. Rowling and Tarantino as examples again). These are obviously extreme cases, but you get the point.

The real question is how much you’re willing to pay to learn this information; the information of whether or not you are, in fact, cut out for a creative career. The simple truth is that you don’t have to pay anything. Host a script on the blacklist, get coverage, send a query letter for your manuscript, enter a contest, give your work to a complete stranger - there are literally a dozen different ways to get this sort of confirmation, and none of them require going to an expensive college. While I also disagree with the concept of going to film school, I can at least see the other side of the argument with equipment facilities and whatnot. But writing? Absolutely not. Pick up a pencil, watch a movie, and write down your impressions. Analyze screenplays, and take notes on them. Read your favorite books, try to deconstruct what the author did. Practice, revise, practice some more. Read books on writing. My personal favorites for screenwriting are “dialogue secrets” and “writing for emotional impact”. “scriptshadow 500 tips” is also good, as well as “on writing” by Steven King for novelists. Search inside of yourself for talent and inspiration. You won’t find it in a classroom.

Good luck to you. I just think you should try to explore other options before committing to either one of these programs. You can always attend in the future, but if you attend now and it turns out to be a waste of time, that’s debt (both time wise and financially) you can’t take back.