@David Stem , The tool you’ve created is awesome. I’m using it to help create my story bible and it’s freaking nuts how good it is at helping me dig into the heart and guts of my story. If you think using an AI tool is cheating, you’re dead wrong. This has been awesome at helping my bring MY creativity, my feelings, my point of view, my truth into the story. It’s deep work. And it’s no different than hiring a coach. In fact, it’s kinda better because you can use it 24/ 7. Big 👍

Most screenwriters are formatting before their character is alive. The problem is that format feels like progress. INT. DINER - NIGHT. Clean margins. Courier 12. It looks like a real script, so you start defending it. That leads to months polishing dialogue and protecting scenes built on an engine that was never running. Ninety pages that look like a movie and feel like nothing. Technically perfect. Emotionally dead. And you can't figure out why nobody leans in. // I know because I did it for years. I moved to Hollywood at 22. The Rugrats Movie came when I was 33. In between: - Three and a half years in aerospace, where I thought I'd die of boredom - Journalism - Advertising - Sketch comedy Every job built a skill. None of it coalesced. Because at the keyboard I did what you're probably doing right now. I ran to the script. I told myself I'd find the story in the drafting. That wasn't a process. That was me treating my ADHD. // Then Sherry Lansing, the President of Paramount, wouldn't let me. She made my writing partner and me write the treatment over and over. And over. She wouldn't let me run to the pages. She made me find the story. The story came from character. And once it was right, the screenplay emerged from it. First draft in five weeks. The notes went from "there's a lot of great stuff here" to "you've written a beautiful story and you should be very proud." That movie opened at #1, beat Will Smith's Enemy of the State, and made $100 million. Eleven years of skills finally coalesced, because someone held my feet to the fire. // So here's what I'd do instead. Build the character before you build a single scene. - The Wound - The Lie - The small life they've settled for - The hunger underneath the plot Then forge the whole movie in prose, a treatment and then a scriptment, while it's still soft enough to change. This is because a living character generates the story. Structure stops being a checklist you force from outside. It becomes pressure the character produces from inside. The scenes have to exist, because the character makes them.

things feel different something in the air something NEW is coming

HEY FORGERS! This week's Business Talk is going to be 🔥FIRE!🔥. Special guest @Matthew Lutz will be sharing a method he developed called SCRIPT REQUEST SPRINT: 50 script requests in 30 days. DO NOT MISS THIS!!! "This isn't a craft course and nobody's giving notes on your second act. This is marketing: targeted, repeatable, and built to get producers requesting your pages." JOIN US on WED, JUNE 24, 10am PST. Link to Zoom call: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86850227314?pwd=Z9bwsCa7KTM0UTWYRaL5FOE8MzQRxa.1 Here's what to expect... SCRIPT REQUEST SPRINT: 50 script requests in 30 days. You wrote the script. It's good. It's also collecting dust on your computer, unread. The hard part was never the writing. It's getting the right people to ask for it. This is a 30-day system for making that happen at volume. Not one lucky break. A machine you can run again and again. This isn't a craft course and nobody's giving notes on your second act. This is marketing: targeted, repeatable, and built to get producers requesting your pages. You'll learn how to build: 1. A target list worth pitching — real producer emails, plus a LinkedIn pipeline of producers 2. Assets that get opened — a query letter that lands, a profile that reads like a working writer, swipe files, and a tracking tool so you don't lose track of all of your script requests and interested readers 3. A daily outreach engine — 50 sends a day, scheduled, tracked, and followed up with 4. The discipline to run it — until the requests come in, and then until one of them turns into a deal We all want to get read. But smoking "hopium" alone won't cut it. This is how you build a tactical and practical system that gets you read... on repeat. This system is about volume. It's not glamorous. But it works. ABOUT MATTHEW LUTZ • Matthew Lutz is a produced screenwriter who works on assignment • The project he's going to share with you in this case study ranked in the top 1% of Coverfly's Red List (out of 50,000+ projects)

Great to have so many new people coming on board! Before I forget, here's the actual link for this Thursday's New Member Hot Seat/Orientation at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven't been in a coaching call yet, this is the place to start. You are welcome to come, hear me pontificate about my philosophy on writing/coaching and why I started this group about 9 months ago. It's started at the urging of my daughter who is now at NYU, studying creative writing. And she told me how much our conversations about creativity and the writing life meant to her. As a father, you never really realize a lot of times that your children might actually be listening to what you're saying. Much less getting something from it. But here we are now. My goal here is to really teach writer's to lean into their own voices, and to be able to move through the ups and downs of what it takes to write a script. To realize that enthusiasm and inspiration ebbs and flows, and the real trick is riding those waves and just to keep getting in touch with that voice inside you, which only comes from consistently getting your ass in the chair. When you frame the struggle as the central task of the creative, then those days when you're not feeling it take new meaning. Anyone can write when inspired. But when you learn to show up and be present for the work, no matter what you're feeling, then you really start learning what it is to be an instrument for your own characters. And not just some moody writer, who writes when they want for their own ego. Yes, I will flat out pontificate in this coaching session. But the more I teach these things, the more important and foundational I realize they are. Because I"m seeing writers move through the process without so much mental drama and procrastination that plagues most of the writing world. If you have pages, drop them here. We'll assign your cast and do a table read of 5-10 pages of your opening. Because nothing is more important for a new writer than the opening of your script. It lives or dies in the first 10 pages.