"No one can teach you screenwriting. Teaching screenwriting is like teaching magic, not just magic tricks but magic. Screenwriting workshops are B.S. Everything starts from reading screenplays". Award winning filmmaker Gordy Hoffman said something to this extent at the full day screenwriting seminar held in Phoenix. 

Gordy won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award in 2002 at the Sundance Film Festival for his film "Love Liza".  Thanks to IFP/PHX for organizing the seminar. Thought I'll share my notes with you. These are not exact quotes rather my own notes from what he was saying so if something sounds terrible, it's probably not Gordy's fault!!

• 50 cups of coffee on 50 Saturdays will create a history with the characters.
• The 100 pages of a screenplay is sharing this history with the audience. - You as a writer will need to know how it ends. Audience will sense from a million miles if you're not sure.
• What happened to the people we cared about? - The audience will ask this. - Put ourself in the heart of your characters.   
• The magic is in the alchemy between personal writing and imagination.
• People need to have an emotional experience in the theater. That is where it is tied to commerce.
• Understand as a filmmaker that men and women in our world can find ways to get to places where characters become villainous. Filmmaking on a serial killer is not a lame judgment on their soul but an understanding about how we as people can sometimes find a way to get to that place.
• How much time do you need to get close to 10 people? And how much time do you need to get close to one person? Keep this in mind before starting to introduce characters.
• Dialogue is not a transcription of real conversation - Compression of dialogue in rewrite is akin to compression of action in editing.
• Screenwriting is a collaborative art. It's not literature.
• Believable speech may lie in the Subtext but where it really lies is in the Practice.
• Your film is not a masterpiece and it's not a piece of crap. Take reviews and appraisals for what it is and LISTEN.
• L.A. is the marketplace where the oranges are sold. If you want to sell oranges, go to the marketplace. If not, then figure out what you can sell from where you are. But don't haul your oranges from PHX to LA every weekend.