SW 622 - The Writer’s Room

Credits: 4
This course is designed to give hands-on, professional experience that will help students find their seat at the table. The first job for the student and their team of writers is to put together a plan for a season’s main story arc, all character arcs, and an episode plan. It’s a huge job, so creating and fostering a creative, cooperative, supportive and well-functioning creative team is the only way to do it well. Students are divided into several Writer’s Room teams and each team works on a different show. Each member of each team is required to “Run the Room,” leading their team through multiple parts of the process of season building, episodic story construction, beat sheets, outlines, script drafts, and revisions. As in a real Writer’s Room, nobody moves forward without the rest of the team. Students should be prepared to contribute to the success of everybody’s episode, and at the same time the team works with the student to improve their story and script. By the end of the semester, every student will have completed a spec script of an existing and ongoing TV series.