If you want eyes on your work and feedback, let's do this. This place is about giving clear direction so the work you do feels meaningful and like it has a North Star. Click me I'm a Zoom link: Tuesday - 10 a.m. PST Drop a logline, idea, pages, treatment... haiku? Are we doing haiku's sure. Drop haiku here It waits for feedback, nervous Oh, Hot Seat, be kind! 🫠

This is a 3-session live workshop. I'll be working with each writer individually, so enrollment is limited. 👉 Sign up now → Emotional Authorship Workshop Enrollment closes: Midnight PT, Jan 31 I taught this in December because it's the absolute foundation of how I see character and script — developed over 25 years of writing and selling at the highest level. To me, this is second nature. But I was amazed to see the light come on in writers' eyes as they came in with great ideas and scripts that "technically" worked... but didn't land. The truth is, you can read all the books and still not see your own work with fresh eyes. You end up chasing your tail through rewrite after rewrite, hoping the next one magically fixes what's wrong. But you can't fix what you can't diagnose. This workshop changes that. It gives you the same tools I used writing $2.5 billion in box office hits. The writers who took this left knowing exactly what their story was about — and why it had never fully worked before. I'm sure some of them will drop into the comments to tell you about their experience. This didn't happen because of inspiration. It happened because of a diagnostic framework I've developed over the last 25 years. The problem Most writers today are taught the externals of what happens. Very few are taught why it matters — to the character or the audience. So you end up with: - Clean structure - Correct beats - A perfectly reasonable outline …and a story nobody really gives a damn about. Why? Because most screenwriting books are written by technocrats who've never actually made their living as writers. They've never gone into a studio and made an executive damn near cry in a meeting that led to landing a two-picture deal — like my partner and I did with Sherry Lansing at Paramount. The missing layer Every story that works is powered by the same internal engine: Wound → Lie → Healing The wound shapes how the character sees the world.The lie drives every choice they make.The story exists to break that lie — or force healing.

Beloved/Hated Shawshank Redemption. OMFG a hallmark card come to life, filled with sappy cliches. I hate this film. Hate hate hate! Admittedly it's been years since I saw it and maybe I should rewatch. Maybe it's not that bad. But I can't rewatch because I've invested so much of myself in hating it, so I'm going to stick with that. Also in contention, Field of Dreams. Ugh. Under-rated Gem: Love Lies Bleeding. An absolute masterpiece in film noir and fantasy and passion and crime and all those good things. Right up there with Bound in terms of great female characters that are burning with life. Guilty Pleasure Armageddon. Bruce Willis flying to space to blow up an asteroid that's going to destory earth? LET'S GO! Also anything with Sharks. Including Deep Blue Sea, about a beautiful scientist harvesting the brain tissue of DNA-altered sharks as a possible cure for Alzheimer's disease. What could go wrong?! Luckily, Sam Jackson comes to save the day. I loved it so much I dragged my entire family to see it. After there were like... why did you make us watch that? Ingrates.

I just got off a call that was supposed to be coaching me on how to make great YouTube content, but the call was way too vague and sales-y for my taste. And reminded me of what I DON'T want to be doing here. This call was basically "Make great content" and you eventually, somehow the algorithm will reward you! But no examples of great content were provided and I found the whole thing fairly useless. Then when the presenter told us we'd need 10 MILLION watch hours on YouTube shorts to be able to monetize, it was apparent they had no real idea what they were talking about. The whole thing made me feel this: If you're going to preach how to do something, SHOW ME SPECIFICALLY how you did it yourself. And SHOW ME SPECIFIC examples of how other people did it. Period. I have plenty of movies I wrote that I'm happy to give examples from in future sessions. How characters were set up, why the audience tied into them emotionally, and the thought process I and my partner used to do that. I want to have kind of a MUST KNOW library of movies to teach from here. I refer to Signs and Toy Story 2 often, because they are masterfully crafted, but I want us to have a community list of movies we are pretty much all familiar with ... and then I will search out the ones I can find scripts for, so we can see SPECIFICALLY what the writers did in creating the characters and scenes we love. This will be part of the classroom/community/coaching philosophy going forward. If you want to be involved and grow as a writer, you'll abolutely need to show up and do the work required - including knowing specific movies and reading the scripts! If you want to be a writer, this should be FUN homework and will really allow us to grow as a community going forward since we'll have a common film language. With that in mind, what are 5 movies you absolutely love and why. I'll create a master list of films and scripts and coaching sessions built around these! So, let's hear it!

Tuesday peeps, drop your pages below! The Zoom link is here. A reminder, this place is about participation and not just watching from the sidelines. If you are going to be on the Tuesday call, please read the material posted in this thread! We've had such great input from members over the last few calls. So, think of this as a grad school workshop, and not just a lecture series! Plus, the more familiar you are with the work that I'm commenting on, the more you'll get out of it! Dave