Those Who Understand

I've been chasing screenwriting for decades (1990 pictured below).

Totally-Unstaged Photo of the Author by Tim Scannell

This continued through my career with Cinefex and after, while I've been working six jobs as a freelance writer. One of those gigs has included work for a terrific little screenplay-reading outfit in Hollywood, Screenplay Readers. Their philosophy is to provide "actionable coverage," helping writers hone their craft by providing objective critiques as tools for works-in-progress.

I've read and written coverage for hundreds of scripts. Works have included features, TV scripts, series bibles, short films, sometimes scripts in production, but most often 'spec' (aka speculative) screenplays by un-produced or inexperienced writers, and occasionally even unfinished scripts by established writers seeking fresh sets of eyes.

Objectivity is hard. And I'm no guru. Not counting my own short films, my only professionally-produced script was four pages long, written for Channel Four TV when I was 24. And I've never had an inclination to be a teacher. That's mainly because, in the back of my mind, I'm haunted by an aphorism attributed to George Bernard Shaw:

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches" –– ouch.

To be fair to Shaw, this quote from his 1903 play, Man and Superman, is apparently a mangling of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. But some have pointed out this interpretation is more likely derived from analysis of the philosopher. Here's a well-known 1930s academic interpreting the great Greek's Psychology and the Nature of Art:

"Artistic creation, springs from the formative impulse and the craving for emotional expression. Essentially the form of art is an imitation of reality; it holds the mirror up to nature. There is in man a pleasure in imitation, apparently missing in lower animals. Yet the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is their reality."

Or, to paraphrase: "Those who understand, teach." A slightly kinder thought.

Digging a little deeper, the full quote from Shaw, from his Maxims for Revolutionists in the back pages of his 1903 play, is wittier and less cynical:

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it

is more dangerous than ignorance.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot."

I'm okay with being a general idiot, putting to use my many hundreds of thousands of hours of movie-viewing, and decades of reading and writing. If that helps someone to take their story to the next level, or helps good work become better, I'm happy to participate.

• George Bernard Shaw here.

• Flashfilms screenplays here.

• Screenplay Readers here.