The Writers’ Room—A Six-Week Workshop

$395.00 – $790.00

The fees from ABC’s adult writing workshops subsidize our free writing programs for kids, whose work is collected in a yearly anthology, and pay our adult workshop instructors. A limited number of seats in each class are reserved for scholarships, which cover 100% of tuition-fees and are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. All are welcome, and we especially encourage BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers to apply.

In the last 15 years, television writing has become especially popular. From the ever-evolving sitcom genre to larger-than-life fantasy and sci-fi series—stories that have felt impossible to capture on screen in the past are coming to life in innovative and exciting new ways. Led by showrunner(s), the writing and development of these shows happen in the writers’ room: a place where screenwriters come together and collaborate.

In this six-week collaborative writing course, we will form a writers room to develop an original series based on a premise chosen by the group. Each week, we will grow our premise into a dynamic, engaging, and original concept by studying and applying the nuances of genre, worldbuilding, character development/conflict, themes, mood, and tone. This workshop will hinge on the question of What If? and how it functions as the engine for the complex development of our series.

In addition to developing our own ideas, we’ll spend time studying the pilots of Orphan Black, Killing Eve, The Good Place, Baskets, The Expanse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Shrill, and others, asking questions such as: What if Buffy lived in New York? How would that change the tone of the show? How would Orphan Black play out if the clones were teenagers? What if Fran was the protagonist in Shrill instead of Annie?

This is a highly collaborative and experimental workshop aimed at helping us to better understand the mechanisms behind storytelling for the screen, the development of a series. The course will provide participants a hands-on approach to screenwriting 101.

This Austin Bat Cave adult writing workshop is open to writers of all levels and is limited to 12 students.