Do you, like many writers, struggle to capture the essence of your project in a single line? In this seminar, Ellen offers tools you can use immediately to craft a clear and powerful premise line-- your first and most important pitch tool. Plus, practical tips on effective pitching techniques, including the one simple thing that changes everything. This is a participatory seminar. Questions welcome.

Plot, whether in fiction or film, is not a structural device into which characters are inserted. Nor will characters merely behaving in an interesting way magically generate a plot. In this three-hour intensive workshop, award-winning author David Corbett (The Art of Character, The Compass of Character) will guide students in an exploration of how character generates structure, not the reverse. We’ll examine how to link inner needs with the outer goals and ambitions of the story to ensure character drives the action, not the reverse. Finally, we’ll see how the characters’ pursuit of their need-driven ambitions can create conflict, trigger meaningful action with profound stakes, and prompt the kinds of insights – whether on the part of the characters or the reader/audience – that produce thematic richness, dramatic tension, and moral resonance.