Make it Hurt:

Bring Emotional Impact & High Stakes to Every Scene

September 3

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene.

How to Be a Writer with ADHD

September 10

In this live webinar, Paulette Perhach shares what she's learned from her own diagnosis and from coaching hundreds of writers through the blocks that keep talented, driven people stuck. She'll walk through the systems that actually work for brains wired for novelty, urgency, and big ideas — not the ones that sound good in theory and fall apart by Tuesday. Writers leave with concrete tools for starting faster, sustaining focus, and building a self-compassionate but rigorous routine that holds up when your brain doesn't want to cooperate.

Description: Leave Out the Parts People Skip

September 12

Elmore Leonard said, “I try to leave out the parts people skip.” Nothing makes a reader skim more than long, flat passages of description that stop a story’s momentum. No matter what kind of writing you do (fiction, memoir, poetry, essay), this live webinar offers tips, tricks, and exercises designed to make your descriptions come to life with fresh, original, vivid images. Everyone tells writers “Show don’t tell,” and this live webinar will show you how to do that effectively and creatively.

The Hero's Journey for Storytellers

September 3 - November 12

This course is about identifying the story you want to write, deciding whether you want to approach your story through fiction or nonfiction, and then having the courage to say yes to the “call to adventure” and move into the “special world” of The Hero’s Journey.

Build Your Novel Scene by Scene

September 3 - November 26

If you want to learn how to write a story, this is the course for you. Get the impetus, the guidance, the support, and the deadline you need to finally stop talking, start writing, and, ultimately, complete that novel you always said you wanted to write.

Watching Movies: Learn from the Masters and Become a Better Writer

September 3 - November 12

In this 10-week course, we’ll take you through some of the master filmmakers and writers of the past—Alfred Hitchcock, William Goldman, George Lucas, Edgar Wright, Steven Spielberg, and more—and give you a peek behind the curtain of their work and how they crafted stories.