Creating Character-Driven Stories

Join me for a one-day online seminar on Saturday, August 26.

London. Paris. Athens. Cologne. Geneva. Mallorca. Mexico City. New York. Toronto. Chicago. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Las Vegas. Austin. Portland. These are some of the venues where I have been invited to teach and speak about my decades’ long passion for character-driven storytelling.

Between these engagements and my blog Go Into The Story, celebrating its 15th year of existence since its launch in May 2008, I was commissioned by Palgrave Macmillan, one of the world’s leading publishers of academic books, to write The Protagonist’s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling. Since its debut in March 2022, the book became an Amazon #1 Best Seller in Film and Television and continues to be a popular title.

And yet…

I receive emails every week from people all around the world. How they can’t afford to travel to one of my public master classes. In some cases, they can’t even get their hands on The Protagonist’s Journey.

As a result, I have partnered with the good people at the Atlanta Film Society to offer a one-day online seminar on August 26, 2023 from 10AM-4PM Eastern Daylight Time (U.S.). The seminar is titled Creating Character-Driven Stories. Here is a description of this learning opportunity.

This one-day online class is aimed at students of the craft who want to go beyond formulaic approaches which reduce story structure to plot. Plot is essential, but it is only half the story. For it is the world of characters and their inner lives which gives meaning to the events they experience. Indeed, it is by engaging characters, getting curious about them, and following their lead that plot comes to life. The guiding principle is this: Begin with character. End with character. Find the story in between.

The class will have three presentations, each with a following Q&A session.

Part One: The Protagonist’s Journey and the Unity Arc. An exploration of the singular importance of the Protagonist to the story-crafting process and their role in the most common narrative archetype: the Unity arc.

Part Two: The Family of Characters. An examination of five archetypes seen with great frequency in movies and television series — Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster — and how this assembly of a story’s characters exists to support the Protagonist’s physical and psychological journey.

Part Three: A Character-Driven Approach to Story Prep. A presentation of a proven professional approach to “breaking story” through a series of character development and plotting exercises resulting in a scene-by-scene outline.

For those who have not read The Protagonist’s Journey, this seminar will present a distillation of my book. For those who have read it, I will expand on that text with updated movie and television analyses including Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Bear, A Quiet Place, Severance, and many more.

Plus, there will be extended Q&A sessions where I will take up your questions live.

The event will be available to anyone who has access to a computer and the internet.

As most of you know, Hollywood writers and actors are currently on strike. One of the key issues: Artificial Intelligence. We have no idea where this technology will evolve over the years, but I am convinced there is one approach to writing which will protect us from AI and that is this:

Writers who can write complex, nuanced characters and character-driven stories.

No matter how sophisticated AI may become, it will never be capable of writing great characters.

Only people like you and I can do that.

Therefore, the more we understand how to write engaging, entertaining characters who convey the heights and depths of human experience, the better off we are as screenwriters and storytellers.

For more information and to sign up for the seminar, go here.