That's the story in today's Premium Coaching session. Shauna's decided find a director will be harder than becoming one. So she went and shot a short to prove she can helm her own damn script. Five minutes. Dark horror. Based on something real that happened to her when she was an artist in residence at a high school, trapped by a skinhead in a cave. She shot it in a church with no permits, in twelve hours. Her producer quit on Saturday before a Wednesday shoot over a contingency fee. She didn't quit, but hung in there and found a replacement at the last minute, and he absolutely delivered. People tell you no. People quit. You don't. That's the whole game. Congrats @Shauna G for getting it done! The pages: @Elliot Moss brought the opening of Vanlyfe. Finn and Sunny, two people living in a broken van they call the spaceship. Beautiful world, funny as hell, but the room pushed on the same thing: make us feel the relationship before we watch the crime. The crux underneath it is the small life. Sunny is stuck and calls it survival. Finn is a crust-fund kid who can always go home, so his freedom is a choice he's pretending is a trap. Then we got into Act 2 of @Michael Booth's romantic horror. Byron absorbs ghosts and has spent his life running from it. The wound is right there and it's brutal: as a kid he was taken from his mother because of what he could do. So the lie became simple. If I ignore this, I'm safe. The small life is avoidance, isolation, a marriage that died because he was never in the room. The room's note was to make the flashbacks earn their place by triggering them, and to let his avoidance be the choice that drives him, not just the thing happening to him. Wound. Lie. Small life. Every strong script in the room was sitting on all three, whether the writer named them or not. That's the work. You find the wound, you name the lie the character built to survive it, and you show us the small life that lie trapped them in. Then you break it.

Working on an exciting project that will help many Forgers write the screenplay of their dreams, plus market it when done. Anyone excited?

Wondering how to transition from an amateur to a professional? David Stem would say, "You must stop saying 'I want to be a writer.'" and actively write every single day. Show up with pages and risk everything; that’s how one gets good, not by sitting in isolation. Join Premium and learn about creating a character whose internal wound causes them to exert control in every scene; no matter the moment, they are always themselves. That’s a strong character, not one that is moved by scenes but one that moves the scenes themselves. Reach out to me, Anna Fermin, or David Stem directly if you need support or have any questions in bringing your pages to a Premium call. Here’s the link to where you put up your casting and your pages. Here’s the link for the Tuesday June 30th Premium Coach Call. Here’s the link for the Friday, July 3rd Premium Coach Call

I am so excited to share the news with you all! The results are in on my entry to the Oxford Script Awards Best US Screenplay, and I am a FINALIST! I am incredibly grateful to @David Stem and everyone in the Writer's Forge for your insights and support! I have been carrying this story in my bones for decades, and it wasn't until finding this community in mid-March that I shifted from a memoir to a screenplay, and wow, I am so glad I am here! There weren't any other teenage girl Assistant Athletic Trainers for a Men's Rugby Team in California or Europe in the 1970s or early 1980s that I ever saw or heard of, so it's a very unique story to be told, and it could only happen here in the Writer's Forge! I researched Film Festivals that were in countries where rugby is very familiar, knowing my story might be seen as surprising, coming from California, a woman, and a member of an Elite San Francisco club from the 1960s to 1980s. We have a long history of traveling overseas to play top competition unavailable in the U.S., and they once played a match in Oxford, a well-established rugby community. So I am beyond proud of this achievement! From Film Freeway: The Oxford Script Awards is an IMDb-qualifying competition built for one purpose: getting your script into the hands of UK industry professionals looking for the next indie talent. Ranked as a Top 15 Most Popular Screenwriting Festival in the UK and Top 100 Best Reviewed globally, we provide the ultimate professional platform for emerging screenwriters. We run a specialized marketing portal for directors and producers where we actively promote the best scripts from every season. This is your chance to be part of a curated selection seen by industry professionals looking for new stories. Moreover, the best screenplays receive our Main Prize of $400 for further development and career support from our professional jury.

David Stem’s philosophy on "levelling up" your writing centers heavily on extreme dedication and learning to sit comfortably in the creative mess. The mess is the process. For that to improve, I have to bring pages and expose my work to other writers who will see things I cannot because I’m too close to my script. With those notes, I return to the process day after day until the mess clears. This is a by-product of proximity to other writers and, in this case, an award-winning screenwriting veteran, David Stem, giving me professional notes. That’s what these calls give you, and that’s golden. Reach out to me, Anna Fermin or David Stem directly if you need support or have any questions about bringing your pages to a Premium call. Here’s the link to where you put up your casting and your pages. Here’s the link for the Tuesday, June 23rd Premium Coach Call. Here’s the link for the Friday, June 26th Premium Coach Call.