ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on interviews with a group of professional screenwriters and practitioners based in London, focusing on the diverse ways in which craft and creativity, and individual and collective working practices are experienced and navigated in the UK industry. It examines the particular creative drive for screenwriters in the development of ideas, drafts and revisions and the professional strategies required to build beneficial industrial relationships and to compete and secure commissions and income streams. Participants who claimed primary job descriptions besides screenwriter also gestured towards vocationalism and made reference to a sense of ‘creative drive’ in terms of career trajectory and, tellingly, these individual origin stories regularly featured trans-Atlantic movement. The chapter illustrates that how-to frame screen-writing manuals and enact the working techniques of rewriting and collaboration as both individual and collective. It explains screenwriting manuals to perpetuate individualistic, conservative and exclusionary notions of what screenwriting is and how it should be done.
