About Immersion Screenwriting

You learn to write by writing, and you learn to write well by studying people who already do it properly. That is the whole idea behind this course, and it is considerably older than any screenwriting book on your shelf.

Picasso copied his predecessors long before anyone called him a genius. Stephen King copied comics word for word into a notebook as a boy, showed one to his mother, and had to admit most of it came out of a funnybook. Musicians learn standards before they write their own songs. Painters copy in galleries. Screenwriters, for some reason, are told to start with theory.

Immersion Script starts somewhere else.

The three pillars

Three recurring tasks carry the whole 28 days, and on most days you will work through all three inside about half an hour.

Forgery

You type out scenes from produced screenplays, word for word. It sounds like a waste of half an hour until you try it. Your fingers learn where the margins sit, how long a description runs before it stalls, and how much a professional writer leaves out. Nobody can explain that to you in a lecture; you have to feel it on the keyboard.

The excerpts are chosen for range: film and TV, recent and classic, dialogue-heavy and description-heavy, Hollywood and arthouse. Some of them will not be to your taste. That is the point. As you work out which ones you would rather have written, you are working out what your own voice sounds like.

Discovery

You read two full-length scripts across the 28 days, one feature and one TV pilot, and you write about both. Reading with a report to file is nothing like reading for pleasure. You start noticing where the story turns, which scenes you would cut, and why the part that bored you bored you.

That is structure arriving on its own, without a diagram. No acts, no sequences, no eight-stage model, at least not yet. You will work out for yourself which parts matter and why, and anything you discover that way lasts longer than anything you are told.

Mastery

You watch a scene and write it as a screenplay. Images on the screen, words on the page, and the gap between the two closing a little every day. This is the closest thing in the course to the job itself, which is why it comes last, once Forgery has taught you the format and Discovery has taught you what to look for.

What the 28 days look like

The course is built in four weeks, and each week has a job.

Week one establishes the routine. Week two carries you to the midpoint. Week three opens up television. Week four is the final push, including the pilot synopsis and the pitch.

Every day is broken into two or three steps, and the site keeps track of which ones you have finished. The streak counter is not there to nag you. It is there because thirty consistent minutes a day for twenty-eight days beats a heroic weekend every time, and a counter is the cheapest way to prove that to yourself.

The midpoint checkpoint

On Day 14 you send me two things: a synopsis of around 600 words, and your script report.

I read both myself and come back with notes, usually within a few days. Nothing is on hold while I read, so keep going; Day 15 opens up as soon as your submission is in.

This is the one point in the course where the work stops being private. Up to here you have been copying, reading, and transcribing on your own. Now somebody reads you back.

What you finish with

There is a certificate on Day 28, signed, and you can download it as a PDF once all 28 days and the script report are done.

What this course actually asks of you is half an hour a day and the willingness to type someone else’s words before you type your own. What you keep afterwards is the habit, an eye for a page that works, and a much shorter list of things you still believe about screenwriting that turn out not to be true.

When you get stuck

Use the Q&A. Post the question, tag it to the step you are on if it belongs to one, and either another student or I will answer it. There are no stupid questions in there, and there is a reasonable chance somebody has already asked yours.

Immersion Screenwriting is run by me, Karel Segers, through The Story Department.