Professional Members, Basic Training Alumni & Guests RSVP HERE.

Please join us Saturday 3/12 at 10:30am, LA time, via zoom for this Mini-Camp to address the challenge of conceptual and structural decision-making in the development of your stories and screenplays. In the space between the craft of arranging parts of the story and the art of curating inspirational material is where professional process transcends typical writing.  Founder Jeffrey Gordon will provide a set of tests you can apply to your story to discover greater connections within the layers of your project.

The seamless storytelling style of the happily-ever-after projection of the American dream was instilled in the early days of Hollywood. The studio founders, who were themselves immigrants from Eastern Europe, cultivated an aspirational ethos that could be shared by immigrant audiences of varied backgrounds–the language of entertainment.

America’s legacy and greatest export is a storytelling method that is layered: Meeting connection between character and action, attributing meaning to encounter and structuring story thematically. In an idea business where big ideas establish the conversation and lineage of story, the creative process for aspiring writers requires a talent for both craft and art. The nexus of these related yet often opposite facets reside in one’s study of the prior topics covered by the ongoing, virtual discussion inherent in the works of recent and past professional artists.

Theme is commonly confused with topicality, though its counterpart in written execution relies on delineation versus platitude. In that way, a story set-up is not enough on its own to indicate distinction. A thematic point needs to be carried through in the writer’s decision about the specifics of a character’s actions, behavior, encounters, interactions and experience along the 2nd-Act Adventure. Story structure is therefore informed by the specific decisions and creative choices that you make as a writer that are inspired by what the story means and, in effect, what you have to say more definitively about the people inhabiting your story.