Creative Support & Benefits

Professional Membership imparts unique Checkpoints, a set of professional writing and collaboration tools covering comprehensive fundamentals of screenwriting for features, television and digital production.

Our goal is to provide you with a repeatable Full Development process that confirms your own creative authority, including an evaluation method on all Four Levels of Development (Concept, Structure, Character Development & Scene Work), as well as Empowered Rewriting.

• 21 months of support—on three to four creative projects— including dozens of unique, practical tools and exercises.
• Free Access to Audio Assistant, an archive of Tools & Events.
• Free Application to The Bivouac, including Eligibility for Writing Jobs.
• Weekly One-on-One Phone Office Hours–even when sessions are every other week.
• Audience Experience: A/V archive of forums and speaker events, and special partner offers.*
• Free Script Evaluation, 2X annually, during and after your initial membership.*

* These benefits are free and ongoing as part of membership.

The Tangible Benefits

The tangible benefits of Pro Membership include 21 months of support. The first 12 weeks are called Basic Training and provide weekly support to learn a set of unique tools and creative exercises while writing a first draft in seven weeks and then two rewrites. In LA, the remaining 18 months are supported directly by Writers Boot Camp founder Jeffrey Gordon in a Project Group with other writers; via One-on-One, outside of LA, writers continue after Basic Training with a mentor individually, with access to teleconferences, blog posts and an audio-video archive.

As you start the 18 months, your mentor will help align your goals based on whether you’re writing a new project or affirming the one from Basic Training, whether you are solid about your concept or reworking it—and depending on writing for television, movies, prose or shorter form or digital. You will have access to Office Hours with a staff member once per week to review Writers Boot Camp materials and key single-sentence and single-page exercises that naturally develop your story and build your script. Rather than impose formula, the tools support your authority as each exercise provides a method of evaluation for improvement.

For perspective, the total of 21 months—which will go by very quickly—provides a platform for the development of three or four projects through numerous stages of rewriting. After the first draft of your initial script, every six months potentially represents a “full development” timeline, a Project Cycle. The actual number of scripts may shift based on their format and due to your own decisions whether to set aside certain drafts to start new projects for further learning and creative exploration.

In effect, you will receive varied forms of support on dozens of drafts of various scripts and projects. Materials include 150 terms, tools, exercises, brainstorming and evaluation techniques. The process includes script evaluation twice annually during and afterwards as an alumnus. Additional benefits include free Mini-Camps at least eight times per year and access to prior recorded material as it becomes available through our Pro Member web page. Just recently, as one of our 30th anniversary initiatives, we’ve added a group of industry insiders as a Career Advisory Panel to further support Pro Member alumni.

Outside of LA, we refer to Professional Membership as OPM, which stands for One-on-One Pro Membership. The main difference of support outside of LA is the continuation of individual work with your mentor after Basic Training instead of working within a group. Currently, OPM writers do not interact with a group of writers and remain on their mentor’s roster for support.

The Intangible Benefits

The intangible benefits include the potential business opportunities that your commitment to productivity may bring. The longer-term regimen, the supportive, collaborative environment–while not pushing a specific creative agenda or bias—and additional time-management approaches will naturally create confidence and efficiency through your enhanced writing and proven illustration of your talent.

One intangible as an alumnus is a business hot line through the LA office for insight and perspective about the business at key junctures in one’s career. And you may discover mutually supportive relationships with future filmmakers and show runners, who share distinctions, tools and a common language of creativity.

An individual artist may excel at a faster pace based on their prior professional experience and parallel process. The benefits of expedited progress and accelerated stages of work, thematic and character-driven layers in one’s work will enhance your awareness, which can lead to a stronger artistic reputation—and many Writers Boot Camp alumni work in other aspects of the business at the highest levels as filmmakers, producers and executive.

The primary emphasis of Pro Membership is on the cultivation of an arsenal of writing samples through an empowered, differentiated rewriting process, including dozens of specific rewriting exercises that preempt many of the conventional writing and rewriting problems. The materials and support help you avoid premature editing, promote more active and deeper idea testing, learn principles of Structure, the layers of Character Development, 50 ways to enhance Scene Work and to cultivate a shorthand for prescribing steps to other writers.

Next: Full Development Philosophy