Life & Wisdom Quote by Douglas Wood

Wood is picking a fight with an industry that sells certainty to anxious writers. The target isn’t structure itself; it’s the seminar ecosystem that treats story as a paint-by-numbers product, complete with proprietary beats, “guaranteed” arcs, and the false comfort of checklists. By calling these seminars the “single biggest contributor,” he uses deliberate overstatement to puncture their aura. It’s a provocation meant to reset the conversation: if scripts are getting worse, maybe the problem isn’t a lack of rules but an overdose of them.

The subtext is about incentives. Seminars profit when they convince you that your instincts are unreliable and that mastery can be purchased in a weekend. Hollywood development already pressures writers toward risk-management: familiar rhythms, predictable “turns,” characters engineered to hit emotional marks on schedule. Add seminar doctrine and you get scripts that read like compliance documents - competent, legible, and dead. Wood’s jab implies that the worst scripts aren’t messy; they’re overly obedient, built to pass a rubric rather than to surprise an audience.

Context matters: the boom in screenplay “gurus,” the cottage industry of Save-the-Cat-style frameworks, and the broader gig economy of creative labor where gatekeeping gets outsourced to formulas. Wood, as a working writer, is defending the messy, idiosyncratic part of craft that can’t be franchised. His intent is less anti-education than anti-credentialism: learn structure by studying great stories and writing a lot, not by renting someone else’s certainty.