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Coffee & Content: Go Where The Opportunity Is
The Stage 32 Community Open House Returns This November — and You’re Invited!
Stage 32 + AFM 2025 Education Partnership - Join RB & Celebrate 10 Years!
Insider Intel: The $10-15M Sweet Spot Hollywood's Chasing Now
November Write Club Week 4: The Art of the Pitch- What Managers & Execs Actually Want to Hear
Insider Intel: 2026 Predictions
Happy Thanksgiving From Stage 32: We Are Thankful For YOU
Insider Intel: Packaging your Project- The Chicken or the Egg Dilemma
Wearing Many Hats As A Creative
Strengthening Croatia’s Creative Future: Inside Zagreb’s Partnership with Stage 32 Certification
3 Lessons in Story Proportion from Working Across Mediums
If you’re taking your career as a writer seriously, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time studying the craft. You’ve read the books—Save the Cat, maybe some Truby or Syd Field. You’ve taken the webinars, maybe even an online course or two. You understand story beats and character arcs and you have a solid sense of how to put the pieces together. But maybe you’ve hit a plateau. Technically, your story works—yet somehow, it doesn’t sin…
3 Ways Ghostwriting Can Empower Your Creative Career
As a ghostwriter, I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to grow as a creative professional is not always through your own words – it’s through the words you write for someone else. When many people think about ghostwriting, they might focus first (and perhaps exclusively) on the paycheck that comes with it. Let’s make no mistake: ghostwriting can be a lucrative addition to your business model. But the benefits of working as a ghostwriter extend far beyond the …
How To Handle Constructive Notes & Nail Your Rewrite
My fellow creatives, we’ve chosen a path that’s not for the faint-hearted. You have to believe, all the way down into the core of your being, that you can do this thing -- that you can create worlds, that you can bring imagination to life. And we ride the pendulum, sometimes on the daily, as it swings between godlike swagger and the abject fear of not being enough. And then there’s dealing with feedback. We are our own harshest critics in so many ways, but we all have…
Avoiding the Rabbit Hole: Story Research Tips
I’ve talked about research before, offering some general tips on how to approach the process effectively. But when I asked in the Stage 32 lounges recently what writing problem you’d solve if you could wave a magic wand, one of the responses was “going down the rabbit hole” on research. I’d break this concern down into two parts: Letting research swallow up too much time in the creative process. Getting sidetracked into very interesting but potentially…
How To Handle Constructive Notes & Nail Your Rewrite
My fellow creatives, we’ve chosen a path that’s not for the faint-hearted. You have to believe, all the way down into the core of your being, that you can do this thing -- that you can create worlds, that you can bring imagination to life. And we ride the pendulum, sometimes on the daily, as it swings between godlike swagger and the abject fear of not being enough. And then there’s dealing with feedback. We are our own harshest critics in so many ways, but we all have…
The Power Of Mentorship In The Creative Journey
As creatives, we can all probably remember the first person who took notice of the unique turn of our minds and chose to affirm it – whether that was a teacher, a parent, a friend, a sibling, or an early fan of our work. This person’s words might have given us exactly the encouragement we needed at exactly the right time. The truth is, it’s very easy for self-doubt, self-criticism, Imposter Syndrome, fear, and the inner forces of resistance to win the day. There’…
4 “Off The Page” Skills To Practice Now!
As we think about our work as writers, sometimes we forget that there are “off the page” skills that we need to develop as well. We spend a lot of time on craft, focused on dialogue, character arcs, and plot outlining—everything we need to make a strong story. But building a career as a screenwriter—or as any kind of creative—involves more than writing. Entrepreneurship, professionalism, productivity habits, and presentation skills are four “off the …
Character Outlining Gets A Makeover
When I was first starting out as a writer, I spent most of my prewriting time on plotting. I initially approached planning out my fiction like we’re all taught to approach essay writing: it’s all about the outline. So that’s where I’d always start: with plot. Please don’t misunderstand me. Story structure is vitally important, and I’ll advocate for taking the time to craft an airtight plot all day long. But, as we know from Aristotle, character is the…
The Starting Line: Understanding Character Want and Need
Hello, creatives! I’m digging into a topic today that’s so important to the success of your project because it creates the inner conflict we love to see in our characters. I’m talking about want (desire) and need -- the external and internal drivers of character choice. To help me explore this concept using a fresh perspective, I’m going to draw on my experience getting on the starting line as a runner and obstacle course racer. Looking at a race is a great plac…
Avoiding the Rabbit Hole: Story Research Tips
I’ve talked about research before, offering some general tips on how to approach the process effectively. But when I asked in the Stage 32 lounges recently what writing problem you’d solve if you could wave a magic wand, one of the responses was “going down the rabbit hole” on research. I’d break this concern down into two parts: Letting research swallow up too much time in the creative process. Getting sidetracked into very interesting but potentially…
3 Strategies For A Better First Draft
As a literature professor and a writing coach, I see a lot of first drafts. In fact, you might even say that first drafts are my specialty. My job in both cases is to guide the writers to a better understanding of their craft and to help them get clarity on the steps that will elevate their projects. Some drafts are in better shape than others when they hit my desk, and so I thought that I’d offer some strategies here to help you improve your first draft process. But first, a defi…
Just Write: Creativity and Fear
We have many different names for the fear that comes along with creative pursuits. Sometimes we call it “Imposter Syndrome.” Sometimes we call it “Resistance” (because, I think, sometimes we hit writer’s block because we’re listening to fear). Sometimes we call it “The Inner Critic.” But no matter what we call it, the effect it has is the same: it’s Snow White’s poisoned apple, that creates a paralyzing slowness that congeals un…
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