Normally reserved for our Professional Members, we are opening up this Mini-Camp to friends and colleagues in solidarity of the Writers Guild of America–and all entertainment industry union members! Fight On!!

Thursday, 5/18, 4-5pm, LA Time

Mini-Camp: Free Script Evaluation

Tools to Make Your Best Script Stronger

with Founder Jeffrey Gordon

We invite you to enjoy a free Mini-Camp with Writers Boot Camp Founder Jeffrey Gordon on the topic of…Free Script Evaluation. We’ll review the most Common First Draft Problems, and deploy a checklist of tools and tests to help free you from the need for outside script evaluation, which will also pre-empt the tendency to rush your material out to market.

While Writers Boot Camp’s unique support includes script evaluation and conferencing as part of the 10-Week Basic Training and all levels of Professional Membership, there are certain threshold creative issues that newer writers will benefit from understanding about the nature of early stages of writing and project development. After all, screenwriting is a profession–and while many ideas do spring forth from one’s personal life, the curation of entertainment is a craft.

Linked to our mission of dispelling fallacies to accelerate careers is the philosophy of freeing our alumni from insecurity about their own work and the unwitting abdication of creative authority. While it can be very natural to lose objectivity about one’s work from the outset and during various stages of rewriting, Writers Boot Camp provides tools for artist empowerment and methods of breaking down the work into more manageable exercises and stages, especially during rewriting.

Many respectable and respected colleagues run companies offering script evaluation services, though we don’t abide or encourage the need for writers to pay extra for script evaluation. Our Professional Membership offers the free, ongoing benefit of script evaluation, along with a constructively directed reinforcement of a method to gradually wean writers off that dependency.

Of course, an earnest and capable practitioner may offer insight that can be justified for the few hundred bucks. But the general lack of experience and education by new writers can render the most insightful commentary superfluous to a writer’s current capacity to integrate notes, let alone at the right stage of the writing and rewriting process. More profoundly, a writer is the presumed expert of their material, so it’s not great form.

The insight of a veteran executive or producer who’s willing to take time to be supportive with insight about commercial viability and creative notes can be perceived as a golden ticket. Too often, however, screenwriters impose on their friends in the business by submitting early drafts of scripts that are premature to evaluate–unless the ultimate bottom line is whether the idea has merit in the first place and, in that case, why impose at all?

The comments of the best facilitator can be lost by the inevitable need for multiple drafts, as well as negated by the editorial stance of an executive and their company’s business model.

That’s why we teach tools for development and why our Professional Members learn dozens of unique rewriting exercises, as well as development tools applicable to the many stages it takes for your script to merit submission.

You can email jg@writersbootcamp.com with questions about the next 10-Week Basic Training or the benefits of Pro Membership.

We always appreciate hearing personal news and breakthroughs, and recent film and TV credits, as well as achievements in book publishing by alumni.