WBC Fellowship

African American Perspectives III: Apply by Monday, February 28th.

Honoring Black History Month, we’re offering our third African American Perspectives Fellowship.  Three writers will be awarded full scholarships to the $2500 12-Week Basic Training starting Monday, March 7th, which will be conducted by Writers Boot Camp Founder Jeffrey Gordon.

You can read more about this creative category and see the application here:  African American Perspectives III

Fellowship Application Overview

Since the start of the pandemic, Writers Boot Camp has provided more than $180,000 in fellowship and scholarship awards, highlighting opportunities to writers of diverse voices, including women and women of color. Through our 32-year history, a high percentage of our successful alumni are diverse.  We encourage all candidates to apply based on the availability to commit 10 hour per week for creative exercises and writing for the duration of the 12-week Basic Training process.

Selection of winners will be based on excellence of prior writing and storytelling experience, along with the distinctions of your point of view.  As is true with most Fellowship categories and parameters, Writers Boot Camp’s focus is to expand areas of creative material and to support new and distinctive artistic voices.  As always, projects will ideally focus on audience engagement and fresh entertainment.

Fellowship categories rotate and change to serve diverse voices and classic, entertaining genres.  Prior demographic parameters have included Asian American Pacific Islanders, Latino & Hispanic Stories, Veterans of Military Service, Young Women Taking the Lead, Women Creating The Future, as well as categories and topics such as Reciprocity for Restaurant & Bar Workers, Cosmic Exchange Stories, California Dreaming, Dance Movies and Family Adventure.

The application process is designed with a short window because we find too many candidates will wait to apply until the last 48 hours. While there is no prejudice of the timestamp in the determination of winners, we encourage you NOT to wait until the last minute.  As always, we believe at Writers Boot Camp that the best idea is the one you’re actually working on–and that is usually the project that you can sustain passion for the many stages of work necessary to fully develop it. The stories that create a relationship adventure beyond the physical adventure of the plot have the best chance to be seen and succeed.  While certain categories require a candidate to be self-identified regarding heritage, the objective is to encourage diversity-driven material in terms of the heritage of principal characters and the nature of subject matter.

Candidates will ideally consider this application as a streamlined form of job interview, and the Basic Training as an opportunity to learn and to develop a stronger writing sample. While the script may not lead to an immediate sale, the process can refine your unique voice and the writing experience may further qualify your ability to support a writers’ room, adjust your professional understanding and attract industry experiences.

The emphasis on single sentence answers can be deceiving–we’re not looking for brevity as much as economy, which will allow you to include compelling and evocative necessities of story. Consider how your answers will convey distinctions as an artist and, conversely, how vague answers or generic comments may fail to do justice to your voice. One trick is to make sure the second half of each sentence is explicit.

Experienced writers will find that Basic Training is more than basic. The terms and tools we impart will be intuitive and confirming without being formulaic, and empower any writer and industry collaborator. Writers who have written before may have an advantage on the application by making the case for their ability to execute their story on the page, yet we find that even veterans of the creative process tend to share the problems of Premise Lines that are missing 2nd-Act Adventures, missing key characters and wind up to be disappointingly more like vague loglines that barely set up the story, versus more complete structural expressions of how the story will work.  A Premise Line is more than a logline.

We look forward to supporting three dynamic artists and their writing process with us. We appreciate the efforts and applications of all the candidates, and the staff will follow up with brief notes about their personal expressions and the potential of their project ideas!

For further information, call 310 998 1199.

Copyright © 1989 - 2024