Or as I like to call it: Why does anybody give a damn. Maybe they don't love baseball, or believe in an afterlife or know anything at all about Maori people. But great writing cuts to the heart, in whatever subject it deals with, and brings the audience along for the ride. So today's Newcomer Call became, in effect, a live mini workshop. Which is what they're geared for anyway. To give you a taste of what we do around here. We started with @Gregory Scott opening pages about a young boy learning baseball from his father. The scene was warm and beautifully observed—but that raised the real question: What is the audience leaning forward to discover? The baseball wasn’t the story. It was the emotional anchor: a memory of who this father was before tragedy changed him, and what his son is still trying to hold onto. Then we read @Ron Sobol's sci-fi opening and talked about the balance between mystery and confusion. You can introduce a strange world, big ideas, and unanswered questions—but the audience still needs one clear human thread to follow. Finally, @Richard Kerr-Bell got his tail up at god knows what hour in New Zealand (I believe) and pitched Incarnation, based on the true story of a young Māori man sent to Rome in the 1850s to train as a Catholic priest. The pitch had powerful themes: faith, colonialism, cultural erasure, identity, and belonging. But themes alone aren’t a movie. The work was finding the specific human relationships and conflicts that dramatize them: Who sends him away—and why? Who tries to change him? Who does he change in return? What does he lose, and what does he fight to preserve? That was the thread connecting the entire call: A story isn’t a collection of events or themes. It’s a human being under pressure, fighting to hold onto—or become—who they truly are. Want this kind of coaching on your own work? Join Premium for ongoing live coaching twice a week, page feedback, story development, and direct support as you build your screenplay.

And it will transform your writing quickly if you let it. I watch it play out every week on the Premium calls. People come in doing what they've been taught. Save the Cat. Beat sheets. Get the hero out on a journey. They end up with scripts even they don't love. Uninspired, but "technically" correct. Then after a few sessions in The Forge, they lean hard into character and their work takes flight. Case in point: Thia joined mid-March. She'd been carrying her story in her bones for decades. Rugby, found family, belonging. A life nobody else lived. She was trying to write it as a memoir and getting nowhere. Four months later: Finalist, Oxford Script Awards. Selected by the Cannes Script Festival out of 410 submissions. Quarter-Finalist, LA International Screenplay Awards. Festival directors are finding her project and personally inviting her to submit. Her first screenplay. So what changed in March? Not more structure. No beat sheets. No 18 plot points. She started before structure. She found the wound, the lie, the small life, the primal question. She used the Primal Forge GPT to dig until the emotional engine of her story was alive. Once it was, the story she couldn't crack for decades practically wrote itself. Structure became the loose cage that barely contained it. That's the method. Thia plugged in come March. You saw what happened by July. If you've been here a while, you've seen this work in your own pages. Drop your story below. New here and want to know how this applies to YOUR screenplay? Comment NEW and I'll personally reach out.

I live in Santa Monica, 6 blocks from the beach. I didn't go to film school, or really know anybody when I moved here years ago. But in that time I've... - Dabbled in movies. Co-wrote Shrek 2, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Disenchanted, the Smurfs movies, the Rugrats movies, and Are We There Yet? - Made a few dimes on my way to $2.5B cumulative box office across a 30+ year career writing, rewriting, pitching, and fixing projects for Disney, Dreamworks, Paramount, Fox, etc. - Written for Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Mike Myers, Neil Patrick Harris, Sofia Vergara, Ice Cube, Katy Perry, Antonio Banderas, Patrick Dempsey, Hank Azaria, Cuba Gooding Jr. etc etc. - Invested my dimes in a house in Pacific Palisades, so my kids could grow up in one idyllic little town, rather than get bounced from place to place like I did. - Watched said town burn down in Jan. 2025, including that house and everything in it. Then watched my daughter go from devastated to thriving her freshman year at NYU. - The same year, I built The Writer's Forge to 620+ members, coaching writers three times per week. Because it's all, all of it, about mindset. - Created the Primal Forge Method: a character-first story development process that helps writers find the emotional engine of their story before touching structure. - Developed proprietary tools already working inside the community: Primal Forge GPT and The Diner Test. Next up: Helping 25 serious screenwriters write, finish and market the best screenplay of their lives in a private cohort I'm calling The Screenplay Forge. If you're ready to get serious and take your writing to the next level, click here to apply. First in, first served. Lock your place now.

I used to be a hungry writer with ideas, instincts, and zero map. No industry access. No real feedback. No one who could tell me what was alive in my work. I once wrote a magazine piece I thought would be my big break. Got a form rejection. Cried in the shower because I felt like an idiot for believing it might happen. I knew what it felt like to be isolated, broke, scared, and creatively unsure. To write things that were funny but shapeless. To be told the work was clever while knowing you could feel the writer trying too hard on every page. Then I learned three things the hard way. Talent isn't enough. Silence only changes when you take action. And real story doesn't start with structure. It starts with what a character is avoiding. Those lessons carried me through a 30+ year career writing and rewriting for major studios. Shrek 2. Jimmy Neutron. Disenchanted. Walking red carpets. Watching movies premiere. And eventually building this groovy little place to help serious screenwriters get the process, courage, and professional direction I wish I'd had when I was starting out. Want the process I wish someone had handed me back then? Comment YES and I'll send you the details.

Yesterday I was telling my boyfriend that I was getting nervous because the results of a screenplay contest I enrolled in are meant to be announced next week. We started talking about my short film and what I had submitted and I realized that he had read the first three drafts of my script but not the last one (I submitted V9 to the contest). And then it hit me: how much my story had evolved. How many scenes I had built, written and then killed because they didn't feel right or good enough. My story has evolved from an ersatz of an idea and a visual concept, to something that actually has legs and creates emotions. I think it will keep evolving, as it's probably not where I want it to be yet. But it was a cool moment to realize how much work I had put in, and how much distance I had covered in that infinite marathon that is writing. Thought I'd share 🙂 Who's feeling the progress too?