Great characters drive every scene they are in. Even when nothing is happening. Writers come to me with the same complaint. The script isn't working. The story feels flat. Audiences aren't connecting. They want to talk about plot — structure, act breaks, whether the midpoint is landing. Here's what I've learned in 25 years fixing broken scripts: the plot is almost never the problem. The character is. The character isn't driving the story. The story is driving the character. They're being pushed from scene to scene by whatever the writer needs them to do next. They don't have a wound. They don't have a specific, consistent way of seeing the world that colors everything they do. They're a sock puppet. And the audience feels it — even if they can't name it. Here's what interesting actually looks like: a character whose internal wound causes them to exert control in every scene — even when the scene is about ordering toast. Jack Nicholson's character is the epitome of this in this classic dinner scene from Five Easy Pieces. Watch it for a masterclass in character. There's no plot in the Five Easy Pieces diner scene. The want is as minimal as it gets. A man wants a piece of toast. But how he responds to being told no tells you everything about how he sees the world and his place in it. Jack doesn't win. He gets thrown out. He never gets the toast. But he never stops being exactly, specifically, unmistakably himself for a single second. That's a character. Not a plot device. SAME SCENE. THREE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE. Watch what happens when you put three fully-formed characters in the same diner, facing the same waitress, asking for the same toast. 🔴 TONY SOPRANO — The Sopranos Tony is already vibrating when he sits down. Something happened today — a betrayal, an indignity. The toast is not about toast. When the waitress says no, Tony goes quiet. Measuring. Then he SLAMS the table. The whole diner jumps. Carmela stiffens. He equates a diner rule with every indignity his mother ever handed him. He engineers the workaround — orders the chicken salad, tells her to hold the chicken. Gets thrown out anyway. Drops way too much cash. Leans in close: "Next time someone tells you they don't make the rules? They're lyin'." No toast. But everyone in that diner knows exactly who he is. That's the wound made visible.

This place is all about community and writers building up other writers. Showing up for coworkers sessions and coaching. So you never have to face the blank page alone. If you're new, take a moment to tell us about your journey and what led you here. What you are working on and your goals for the coming year. Welcome!

Something happened on this week's New Member Workshop that I want to share. And if you're new I want you to read what happened with @Adrian Cranage and @Ameer Ahmed, then I want YOU to show up for our next workshop on Thursday, March 26 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Two writers brought pages to a table read for the first time. Both of them blew us away. That's not a given. But it's what happens when you show up with real work and let the room hear it out loud. There's nothing like that moment. You've been alone with these pages — maybe for years. And then suddenly there are voices. Characters come alive. You hear things land. You hear things that need work. It changes something. Adrian is a cinematographer who spent 30 years behind the camera. The writers' strike hit, the German industry collapsed, and he used that time to finally finish something he'd been carrying for two decades. He scanned 100 pages of handwritten notes into AI — not to write it, to excavate it — and came in deep into a second draft. His pages opened in Bosnia. A war photographer. A dead child. A moral question that James can't answer and a camera he can't raise. The room went quiet. The feedback: these characters have a life before the plot begins. You can't fake that. Ameer is a year out of Full Sail and brought a short he's been developing since school — 13th draft. It's called How to Spell. A teenage girl named Jesse, a dangerous home, and magic. Not metaphor-magic. Real magic. She trains herself in secret, then uses what she's learned to confront the man terrorizing her family. Think Chronicle — superpowers grounded in where you're from and what you're living through — but with a young woman at the center. The title lands by the end. The conversation shifted fast to what this becomes as a feature. If you haven't been on one of these calls, this is what you're missing.

Hola, Forgers. Here's what's moving in the industry today. - OpenAI Shuts Down Sora. Disney Pulls Its $1 Billion Investment. The AI video tool that was supposed to change everything? Dead. Disney walked away from a billion-dollar stake before any money changed hands. Three months after inking a deal to let users generate Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars characters with text prompts, the whole thing collapsed. If you were worried AI was about to replace visual storytelling, today's a good reminder: the tech isn't there yet. And the money people know it. - Paramount Skydance's $110.9B Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Moves Forward The biggest consolidation play in Hollywood history is happening. Paramount Skydance beat Netflix in a bidding war for WBD, picking up the Warner Bros. film studio, HBO Max, and CNN. Fewer buyers means fewer doors. If you're writing features or series, the number of places you can sell just got smaller. Know who's left and what they're buying. - Academy Announces 2025-2026 Nicholl Fellowship Recipients This year's Nicholl Fellows include Lynn McKee, Katla Solnes, Leo Aguirre, and the writing teams of Omar Al Dakheel & Elie El Choufany, and Sara Crow & David Rafailedes. Pitches ranged from Texas dramas to the birth of Bitcoin. Proof that original stories still open doors at the highest level. - FOX Greenlights Two-Season Order for Stewie, a Family Guy Spinoff FOX is betting big on known IP again, ordering two seasons upfront for a Family Guy spinoff focused on Stewie in preschool. Networks keep doubling down on built-in audiences. That's the landscape. Original specs still matter, but if you can attach your voice to existing IP, there's a lane.

If you've just joined, welcome! As part of our Great Character Challenge, I'm hosting a hands-on workshop this Thursday at 10, where I'll personally teach you to use the most powerful tool I've ever used in my 25+ years of selling films at the highest level. It's the Primal Forge GPT, an AI that I trained on my coaching methodology — the same framework I use in every session to help writers uncover the wound that shaped their character, the lie they're living, and why the story isn't working yet. And the same methodology I used on films that cleared $2.5 BILLION worldwide. In 5 minutes, it can radically transform how you see your characters and introduce powerful ideas to elevate your story. This is geared toward new members, but anybody is welcome to attend. And if you've been lurking for a while, you've seen the amazing coaching sessions we have and read about the writers raving how their eyes have been opened to take their craft to a whole new level. Come join us and learn first hand what the excitement is about. Primal Forge GPT Workshop - Thursday 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The reviews are in from members and a testament to working with this incredible tool: @Lena Lieuvin "It gave me very precious space to brainstorm with myself by asking me questions to take my characters further. It allowed me to put a finger on something that was bugging me from the beginning and I couldn't quite grasp. Now it's changed and everything is smooth." @Ian Campbell "It unleashed a torrent of feedback, questions, analysis and homework. It also refused to do the work for me — forcing me to think through each character's motivation, situation and goals." @Krystel Biasotti "Threw my whole script in there, and it gave me some really useful reflection questions to refine the wound/lie/truth and pressure points."