This dissertation examines the how-to screenwriting industry, which is the range of services and products created to profit from aspiring screenwriters. The industry is for many the most visible source of knowledge about what screenwriting is, what it can be, and who can participate. Moreover, the industry offers the most accessible, if not the most effective, paths to screenwriting careers for many aspirants. And yet, studies of the film industry have largely ignored the how-to screenwriting industry, alongside the range of how-to industries for other creative practices, because they exist on the apparent margins of industry. Putting those margins at the center of this dissertation, I argue that the how-to screenwriting industry is a significant instrument of power in the commercial film industry, one that serves primarily to mold nonprofessional screenwriters into more exploitable workers. Each chapter turns to a different set of participants in the how-to screenwriting industry in the United States over the last twenty years. Combining discourse analysis, textual analysis, historical analysis, and interviews, I examine screenwriting not as a profession nor an art form but as a popular practice whose boundaries, attributes, and place in the film industry are continually negotiated (and renegotiated) by screenwriting magazines (Chapter 1), for-profit degree programs (Chapter 2), blogs (Chapter 3), platforms (Chapter 4), and activist campaigns (Chapter 5), among others. Ultimately, I argue that the how-to screenwriting industry profits from its efforts to obscure systemic inequities in screenwriting, setting out to convince aspirants that its services are a reasonable down payment for a fulfilling, if unlikely, career in a meritocratic industry that rewards the most malleable and persistent subjects. This dissertation interrogates the beliefs and practices promoted by the how-to screenwriting industry in an effort to carve out discursive space for screenwriting practices that resist or reimagine—not simply reproduce—media power.