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This is the wrong question to be asking. The question you should be asking is what do i want to write, a hollywood movie score or a classical work? Film composition and classical composition are two completely different disciplines and the music is structured in completely different ways. Several composers' work inhabits a sort of neutral zone between the two (e.g. Vaughan Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Tan Dun) but all of those composers started out in the classical world with rigorous training—their first loves were classical works or popular music, rather than film scores—and went on to write for film afterwards. Not many people ever seem to go the other way round. Writing classical music requires so much more knowledge and training and for most people it has to be training that starts very early. If you really want to write a classical work, particularly in a large form such as a symphony, you need several things. First of all an intimate understanding of every instrument you are undertaking to write for, its actual sound, capabilities, range and expression. Books tell only part of the story. Second the ability to create a musical argument. If you are working in a relatively traditional style (something i recommend for beginners) this means you must give the piece a focus—a key, a theme, a leitmotif, a twelve-tone row—develop it, depart from it and return to it. This is also rather vague, but dedicated analysis of major works of the symphonic repertoire from Haydn to Shostakovich (roughly) should prove instructive. Third and probably most important is the ability to visualise the entire structure in your mind—to give every sound a meaning in the overall direction of the piece. A film score is discontinuous, but in a classical piece each note must inevitably lead to the next, such that the piece could have been composed no other way. If you write tonal music a sense of key (or at least "grand cadence") is necessary—in a film score one can modulate up a semitone every time the suspense needs to be cranked up, but in classical music this palls quickly and makes all keys become more or less interchangeable (this is carried about as far as possible in pieces like Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande with tiresome results) to the detriment of the tonal hierarchy according to which the piece is organised. If your music is post-tonal in technique you are responsible for determining the musical logic that will be the generating entity of your composition. For some specifics—there is no fundamental difference in scoring or orchestration between film and concert music (a lot of film scores use orchestration clearly derived from Tchaikovsky & Wagner). There's nothing wrong with being linear—all music is linear; in fact it's much better to be consistently linear than to stop on a perfect cadence every eight bars. Keep your four- and eight-bar phrases for forms that do not exceed twenty-four bars in length. In a symphony you want to space your music in much broader phrases, and more importantly, elide the ends of those phrases so that the music never stops dead. Periodic phrase rhythms can still be used, but they should be alternated with phrases of irregular length to avoid monotony. If you want a locus classicus for this sort of thing in a symphonic context, this (large file) is probably it. (along with most of the other things i mentioned, although i wouldn't necessarily recommend it as an orchestration manual.) With all this said... if what you really love is film music, there's no reason to feel you need to write classical. It may help in some aspects—the way an english degree has a chance to improve your writing skills—but it's hardly necessary or even desirable. If you're passionate about both genres, you should definitely try doing both (i know much less about film composing but Max Castillo/Jem7/several other people can offer superior advice on the subject).