THANK YOU @Chris Dyer for this incredibly informative presentation and talk. As you can see it ran well over our one hour time slot, but it's jam packed with useful and actionable information. Thanks to everyone who came. It was great to see how many of you were there in person. Great group! If any members have questions about Chris' talk OR would like to discuss specifics about your own project with Chris, please feel free to message him directly. We are so grateful for your knowledge sharing and generosity with this community, Chris. You're awesome!

Your script has been "almost done" for how long now? Six months? A year? Three years? Here is the thing nobody tells you about finishing a screenplay. It does not get finished because you finally feel inspired. It gets finished because you finally focus the f up and power through to the end. And then the pesky rewrites. Without a deadline, you can be dead in the water. I once had to call my writing partner and tell him he had to give me a deadline on something because I wasn't working on it, but I thought about working on it all day. And he'd made the mistake of telling me, oh just finish it up whenever. So he told me next Thursday and next Thursday, it was done! That is what a script competition is actually for. A script competition can be your "next Thursday." Forget winning. Forget the laurels. Forget whether the contest "matters" or whether the judges "get" your work. None of that is the point right now. The point is a date on the calendar that you cannot move. Pick a comp. Mark the deadline. Now your draft has a job. A few real ones with real runways: Austin Film Festival. May 27, 11:59pm Central. Two days. If your feature is in shape, hit send. Tubi x Black List Horror Initiative. Open through June 30. One Black List evaluation gets you eligible. Tubi produces the winner. Scriptapalooza Fellowship. Final deadline July 1. Mentorship, not just laurels. Five weeks to get one script genuinely ready. Big Break, PAGE Awards, Shore Scripts. All have summer windows. Look them up. The number of writers in this community who have a script that is 85% there is enormous. The number who have a finished, submitted draft is much smaller. The gap between those two groups is not talent. It is a deadline. So here is the ask. Drop a comment below. Tell us: 1. Which competition you are entering 2. The deadline 3. The script you are sending Public commitment. We will check in. You do not have to win. You have to finish. More on the full comp calendar next week. For now, post your next Thursday.

I was watching an interview from a french actress who plays in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film “All of a sudden”. They presented it to Cannes Film Festival and it’s nominated in a lot of categories. She was telling that the director, before they started shooting, gave her a list of 17 questions answered by her character. Some were completely unrelated to what happens in the film, but all were aimed at getting a better understanding of who the character really was. I thought it was an interesting approach. I’ve been looking all over the internet to try and find said list but it is nowhere. So I thought: why not make our own ? If we were to make that list, which questions would you include?

It just occurred to me there is a link to the very first interview I saw of our illustrious leader @David Stem under HIGHLIGHTS: click on “Writers on Writing”. Just click on the image and SELECT WATCH FULL REEL and you’ll be able to watch it(see pictures below)—- it’s great and the reason I was so excited to find him on Skool. He talks about treatments and how important they are to his process. https://www.instagram.com/davidhinnebusch Also the book @Chris Dyer mentioned is The Narrative Gym by Randy Olson, PHD using his ABT system and but and therefore. PLUS: A link to @Anne Clendening ‘s Website: https://anneclendening.com/bad-daughter-part-one/ And lastly, if you can’t get enough of writers rooms, here’s the link to the Writers Guild Foundation office hours happening on Tuesday after class they too have guest speakers. @Thia Markson has been going you can ask her as well! https://www.wgfoundation.org/events/all/2026/5/26/wgf-library-office-hours Below is a photograph of the painting of a DeLorean that I recently sold. Originally, I’d been asked to paint it for the CEO of a skateboard company called Z-Flex.

Hi there, I’m Elliot (they/them)! I’m a multi-hyphenate writer and actor, and a whole bunch of other busy things. I’ve had a somewhat unique journey as a professional artist, and I wanted to yap a little bit about the adventure of it all. A few summers ago, I wrote, directed, produced, and starred-in (like I said, very busy) the most- nominated play at the 2024 Hollywood Fringe Festival—vanlyfe. By far, producing my own material was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And while it opened up a lot of funhouse doors in an external sense (producer meetings, an option agreement, the glory), it was the resulting inner transformation as an artist that has been the most impactful and enduring. Before I shifted my focus to writing, I was a professional actor for 15 years. This gives me somewhat of an edge, because I habitually understand story through the perspective of an actor playing a role, which has been invaluable to writing characters that feel grounded, spontaneous, and fully-embodied. It also means that I read hundreds and hundreds of scripts before I ever sat down to write one. For these reasons, I cannot recommend acting training enough (that said, beware of cults, but that’s for another thread). While I did have some success as an actor, I rarely auditioned for characters that I resonated with. This is in part because of my own freaky life experience, but it’s also because I was trying to squeeze myself into pre-made boxes instead of building my own box (or getting outside my own box?). I went out for hundreds and hundreds of projects in the years I was auditioning in LA, but it was when I found my own voice and told the story that made me feel the most alive, with no lust of result or expectation of success, that everything I was chasing for 15 years literally fell into my lap. The second you decide to step foot in the entertainment industry, everyone dog-piles on you about how impossible it is and how much you have to sacrifice in order to succeed. Which is totally true, but I honestly believe that the secret to good writing is a life well-lived—and no one else has or ever will live your life but you. You don’t have to have lived a batshit crazy life—and I can’t honestly recommend it—you just have to be present enough in your own life to feel the magic. And then sit down and trust yourself to actually write the damn thing.