My writing has been self-taught, except for a few screenwriting classes at universities. I read many creative writing books and committed many hours of intensive labor but never set foot in one of those creative writing classes.

A friend of mine once set me up to audit a screenwriting class at UCLA sometime in my twenties. That’s right. It was free to sit among pursuers of a Master’s degree. It felt like winning a lottery. What was the professor’s name? Anyway, she taught us the rules of screenwriting. This was before my dive into the creative writing books and before my collaboration with an ambitious soul.

The class hated me. They knew what was up. The students would comment on each other’s work, but when it came to my turn, one of the women said to me, “I’m sorry, but I just didn’t have time to read it.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. She’d had time to read everyone else’s work.

My psychiatrist said, “You know what that means?” He raised his middle finger at me. “It means fuck you. I paid for this class, and you didn’t.”

She’d offended me. But that didn’t stop me from attending the classes.

At the end of the semester, the professor called me into her office. I was excited to hear what she had to say.

“Throw all of it away,” she said.

I’d completed the first draft and spent all those hours, and there she was, telling me to throw it all away and start over. It hurt.

The rewrite never happened. I moved on to another script, one that didn’t make me cringe.

Then, the ambitious soul came into the picture. He found me online somehow.

“I got this idea, based on a book series about marines in space. I need someone to help me write the scripts.”

The idea was silly to me, but dollar signs were in my eyes. This guy really saw potential for a franchise to start based on these books that were written.

So we began our journey through the script about marines in space. The characters were stereotypes to the ninth degree. You had the cigar-chewing colonel, the tough-as-nails female officer, the Native American lieutenant who shot flaming arrows with his bow (in space), among other flat characters.

“Can I use a pen name?” I asked the guy.

“For what?”

What was there to say? He couldn’t hear about my embarrassment about the project. He was too prideful about it. He grew up reading the book series as a kid.

We even met the book series creator in Florida, where my partner also lived. The creator was an old man who lived in a meager house with dirt and trash everywhere. He was a sexist ex-marine who called all women mercenaries.

The project did go somewhere, just not all the way. Cable networks were interested; actors whom my writing partner had handpicked were interested. He even had a university art department sketching the storyboards. Everything fell in line, but it came up short after our agent dumped us. He saw the potential disintegrate, and so did my faith.

My writing partner and I stopped talking after about ten years of communicating and writing new drafts of the same old script and sequels. It was tiresome. One day, it was a film idea; the next day, it would be a possible TV series. It was Screenwriting 101 to me. Forget about the class at UCLA. It taught me not only the creative but also the business side of things, and it made me jaded. Industry people were flaky. Besides, there was no more belief in the project, and there wasn’t much belief to begin with.

As I’d said, this was just an education. I wanted to focus on my personal projects. Eventually, my enthusiasm for screenplays would die, and I would put forth my energy toward a manuscript, which took seven years to write.

I wrote my final screenplay in 2018, but after my friend wouldn’t read it, which was another problem (finding readers), I decided to give up. Now, I write nothing but short stories because I have no more novel ideas.

Should I take a creative writing class? What about a writer’s group? A therapist told me to join one, which made me skeptical, not about him but about groups, maybe because of my fear of judgment. What if their work is way better than mine, and I don’t belong there? Or the opposite. What if my work is better, and theirs is trash?

Anyway, I shall continue my journey through autodidactism, a word I learned from Hemingway. Who needs a school when there’s a wealth of knowledge on the bookshelves and the real world?