Free Mini-Camp: “Making Your Best Script Better”

Tue, Jan. 23rd, 5pm-6:15pm (LA Time) via zoom

with Founder Jeffrey Gordon (JG)

PLEASE RSVP HERE 

RSVPs will be accepted until 5pm the day before.

Once you RSVP, zoom will control your access.

Join JG and fellow alumni for a special Mini-Camp to review many of the common script problems that by default become writer problems based on one’s loss of objectivity and self-awareness in the middle of the writing and rewriting process.

The goal of the Mini-Camp will be to provide you with insight to address three or four of the couple dozen ways that your best script may be made an even better script (or manuscript)–and in effect a better writing sample.

After all, rewriting is where most writers earn their livelihood, as opposed to setting up original material, and your writing samples illustrate your talent for hire.

Additionally, the incompleteness of an idea will make it improbable to extend a complete story–and lack of structure, inexperience applying intuitive tests, the tendency to be autobiographical or to internalize character, as well as conventional rewriting and premature editing will tend to inhibit the full execution and expression of a writer’s vision. That’s assuming a writer has a vision!

The movie, TV and publishing worlds are idea businesses.  Certainly, the limitations and derivative nature of ideas and stories may limit the viability of a project.

Normally reserved for our Professional Members, this is a free topical event to support breakthroughs as you approach the year ahead. If you RSVP, please let us know if you have a last-minute conflict and cannot attend. Feel free to forward to one individual artist who will benefit from what we do.

This short Mini-Camp will help you identify your priority areas of improvement. Whether it’s in your business approach, your planning and process management, or story development, or issues on the page, a few of the many recurring writer problems will naturally resonate.

Our Professional Members gain the benefit of the delineation of the writing process into six stages of achievement, most of which are about rewriting in layers. They quickly learn to avoid linear or text-driven writing and editing of earlier drafts.

Jeffrey Gordon, Writers Boot Camp Founder, has also identified 50 specific exercises to enhance one’s “Scene Work”, the written pages, in screenwriting and prose writing. Even a handful of these applied to your work can activate your creative voice and cultivate a more specific and individual writing style all your own.

More Details About the Mini-Camp Focus

For Pro Members in particular, this Mini-Camp will facilitate and reinforce the stages of rewriting that you may not have had the chance to apply and integrate into your work process due to frequently setting projects aside upon noticing flawed concepts to start new scripts.

Even for accomplished writers, it’s natural to fall back into the bad habit of linear writing when you are working in the trenches. That problem leads to being content-driven and becoming prematurely text-driven rather than focusing the layer of fresh entertainment that elevates a script’s execution to be more conceptual.

A script is not a true writing sample or representative of your professional skills if the concept does not feel viable in some way–and it will feel more viable when you have identified and highlighted the entertaining layer of moments that represent your fresh approach.

Of session, even the best concept for a movie or TV series will be limited by your level of craft on the page. Ultimately, the execution of the script page is a function of the idea expressed page-by-page and that’s one of the unique aspects of screenwriting versus other forms of writing like prose. That said, writers of books and novels will benefit from the application of Writers Boot Camp’s structural and fundamental tools.

Writers Boot Camp’s support of countless careers for more than 30 years has encouraged alumni through unique tools and techniques to activate and align through focusing on the work.

The strategies of integrating more definitive rewriting techniques, regularly updating Premise Lines and project lists, and owning one’s storytelling approach–within scripts and manuscripts, and also in the arrangement of shared personal experiences and anecdotes–empower and cultivate a sensibility, a creative intention and direction.

Additional Note About Our Professional View

While Writers Boot Camp’s tools ritually help writers become more productive and efficient with their time, it’s professionally important to refine your creative point of view and artistic intent.

Career breakthroughs after numerous scripts and struggles are mostly due to a writer’s hard-fought epiphanies from countless critiques by producers, executives, friends in the business and gatekeepers (readers). Undeterred, the integration of the layers of comment can finally foster a writer’s own authority.

A writer’s lack of idea testing, including the failure to compare and distinguish ideas to the lineage of what’s come before, will tend to limit success and creative transcendence. The best writers do not take years and years to get a clearer picture of the process and the profession.

If you have hesitated to go through our 10-Week Basic Training or to become a Pro Member, especially if the obstacle has been primarily financial, then we encourage you to email us to schedule a conversation to stop letting finances be a career obstacle.

For questions, call 310/998-1199 or email jg@writersbootcamp.com.