Writing in Your Personal Voice

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

We break down voice into two steps. First, you will learn how to draw from the essence of your story to organically derive surprises and reversals that create an inner consistency and unity in tone and style. When your script is “faithful to itself” and the foundational pillars of concept, theme, character, and location, it will have a unified voice. This won’t necessarily lead to your personal voice or deep personal expression but it will create a unique story.

The more romantic notion of your personal voice is when you can strip falsity and cliché from your storytelling so that you can reveal world, characters, story, or yourself with nuanced complexity and humanity. This authenticity impacts an audience in a surprising meaningful way.

A script’s “fidelity to itself” -- its ability to spin clever and integrated surprises from its setup -- isn’t sufficient to bend the “voice of the script” toward your personal voice. It’s not just where you end, but where you begin. Your personal voice requires more control over your premise, its setup and, often, how you tell the story. To be more uniquely you, your script must contest prevailing limitations that could include the status quo of modern cinema and of the real world.

This OnDemand webinar delivers concrete tools and principles to use to develop your personal voice as a storyteller.

Jim wrote The Craft of Scene Writing: Beat by Beat to a Better Script, the first-ever screenwriting book that focuses solely on scene writing. Renowned author and story guru Michael Hauge praised the book: “(Jim) reveals every component of a well-written emotionally powerful scene.”

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• How to use genre as a bridge to your personal voice
• Why sporadic iterations of your personality, quirkiness, or deep-seated passions are not enough to sustain a script and define your voice
• Achieve absolute idiosyncrasy by merely staying true to 4 elements of your story
• The importance of specificity ... it creates the best opportunities for payoffs
• The obstacles that impede you from writing an honest and personal story
• How to be subversive and personal in a seemingly conventional script
• Disciplined creativity and the ability to color within your own lines to ensure your script accomplishes what it is intended to do
• How to avoid the faux masterpiece
• You’re most personal story often becomes your most universal

WHO SHOULD LISTEN?

• Writers who want their work to stand out
• Storytellers who are currently tackling an extremely personal story
• Screenwriters struggling with making a political or thematically profound script more dramatic and less didactic
• Writers who want to innovate or transcend current genres
• Writers ready to write their magnum opus
• Writers who want to learn how to put “more of themselves” into their work
• Screenwriters, novelists, playwrights, fiction writers

The Writers Store does not offer any refunds for the webinar. All sales are final.