ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which the genre concretizes and regulates the profession through a particular set of hegemonic codes and conventions — structure, characters, conflict, entrepreneurialism and precariousness. It offers a critical analysis, both of a selection of manuals themselves and of their construction of screenwriting labor, but also of the ways in which manuals are written and used by screenwriters. The chapter describes how is screenwriting work circumscribed and regulated by how-to manuals and how and why do screenwriters use them to work? It illustrates that how-to discourse is both omnipresent and unstable; it is repudiated within and outside screenwriting practices, classrooms and production spaces as much as it is used to entrance and recruit. Viewed as a genre, how-to screenwriting manuals are key sites within which screenwriting labor is made utterly knowable and ‘doable’ and, at one level, the texts proffer a singular address to writers as autonomous individuals.
