Q. I'm a high school student who wants to pursue a career in TV writing. I've been working my way up to writing some specs, and also I've been doing a little bit of playwriting, as it's just easier to find youth classes devoted to that than any other media writing outlet. What do you recommend for a kid right out of High SchoolI would never tell anyone not to go to college. No one ever made much of himself without finishing university. Except, you know, Steve Jobs. And Steven Spielberg. And Bill Gates. And Thomas Edison. And Shakespeare.
In Crafty TV Writing, you advise all prospective writers to get an internship/assistant position at a literary agency in L.A., or if you can on the staff of a TV show, but I felt this advice was given with "adults' in mind, and I wasn't sure if this was the optimal path right out of high school.
Would it be better to go through NYU's Dramatic Writing program (which I was not accepted to, though a friend of mine was) or to do as you say and get a job inside the business and save a degree for later? As you may have guessed, part of my hesitation stems from the whole stigma against not going to college--a stigma which I am ready to ignore in pursuit of a TV writer's position. But I just wanted your genuine opinion as to what a high school graduate should do to become a TV writer.
I would still never tell anyone not to go to college. The facts you learn in college are rarely useful in themselves. No one is going to offer you $100 to compare Dante to Milton over the weekend. But you learn how to learn, and you learn how to think at a problem from different angles. And you learn to read deeply.
Also, you make a slew of friends who may be useful to you later. And if you're writing plays, it's a hundred times easier to get them produced at university than they would be out in the cold hard real world. It is a real pain in the ass getting a play produced at an Equity Waiver theatre. At college, they will produce your play for you, and offer you cake. (See "Sorkin, Aaron.")
I'm not sure you need a dramatic writing program in college. I was a computer science major; Yale didn't have creative writing, really, except one course with Harold Bloom. (I actually spent a semester hanging out in New York auditing classes at Columbia to circumvent this. I just did the work and no one seemed to mind I was just auditing.) I worked on a literary magazine at Yale (Zirkus) and founded another one (The Trumbull Review), and there was no shortage of poems and stories. A buddy of mine wrote plays which were performed at Yale. Neither the writing nor the performing were for credit. If you're a writer, you'll write. No writer ever needed a writing class. But you can't really study James Joyce on your own and expect to make anything out of Ulysses. And learning how to unpack some crazy Modernist's styles will develop your analytical muscles that you can then apply to figuring out the template to THE GOOD WIFE or 30 ROCK.
You can get part-time internships when you're a student. You can't come into an agency part time when you're 22, but you can when you're at UCLA. Everyone understands that you can't be full-time. So in some ways it's easier to break in as a promising student than as one of many underemployed adults. You could intern at an agency, but part-time, and without having to be a messenger. If you actually got offered a writer's assistant job, you could drop out of school, and then if it led nowhere, you would return to school.
Finally, there is nothing preventing you from writing TV specs while in university. I wrote lots of stories and poems at college when I wasn't debugging programs; and Computer Science was a ridiculously hard major compared to English. Your typical college student has a ton of time to write, if that's what he wants to do. Actual jobs are much more tiring. College gives you an excuse not to go get a job.
College gives you an excuse to be wet behind the ears. If you aren't in college, even if you're the same age as a college student, people expect you to be a grownup. People are much more forgiving of college students for tripping over things, or for offering their opinion when no one wants it.
I think it's great that you have a strong opinion about what you want to do. I wouldn't consider college an impediment, though. If you work it right, it can be a platform, or even a diving board.
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