The Method
Most script consulting begins when the pages already exist. You write a draft, send it out, someone reads it and tells you what isn’t working. Sometimes the notes are useful. But by then, the characters have already made their choices, the structure has set, the story has decided what it is.
What you're buying at that point is a diagnosis of something already built. And the more fundamental the problem, the more expensive the repair.
I work earlier than that.
when changing the story
doesn’t cost you months.
A film is an engineered emotional experience.
Someone sits in the dark for a hundred minutes and feels a specific sequence of things: curiosity, tension, heartbreak, dread, relief.
Some people treat that as a byproduct of good writing. I see it as design. And it can be designed on purpose.
That's the work. Going beat by beat, figuring out what the audience is feeling and asking one question:
Did you mean for them to feel that?
Why before what.
Before we do anything else, I want to know one thing:
Why this story?
I'm not interested in the classic why now, why you. Leave that to the pitch deck. I want to know what about this idea gets under your skin enough that you’re willing to spend the next several months living with it.
This sounds soft. It isn't.
Almost every writer I’ve worked with who was lost by draft seven had the same problem. Somewhere along the way, they forgot what drew them to the material in the first place.
The story became a technical problem. The solutions were all defensible. Eventually, the thing became competent and dead.
If we can find the emotional trigger underneath the idea and name it clearly, everything downstream gets easier. You stop guessing. You have something to test decisions against. When the story gets complicated, you know what you're trying to protect.
You'll probably find this is also the least comfortable part.
That's usually a good sign.
you don’t have to lie to me.
The character's view of the world.
Once we know what the story means to you, we build the mechanism that will carry it.
Every protagonist worth following has a worldview: a set of beliefs about how the world works and what they have to do to survive in it.
The story begins when reality stops cooperating.
From that, we can find the conscious want, the subconscious need, and a flaw rooted in that worldview rather than a personality quirk or a useless piece of biography.
I don't need to know where your protagonist went to school.
I need to know why they believe what they believe. How they hold onto that worldview when pressure comes. Which sides of them other characters bring out. What that worldview gives them and what it costs them.
And what happens when it finally fails. or doesn't.
Structure as emotional design.
Only now do we come to structure.
And we do it twice.
First, we build the spine: the central dramatic question, the underlying dramatic mechanism, and the major plot points that grow out of character rather than being imposed on it.
We also make a decision about how the audience experiences the story. Are they asking what happens? Or do they already know, and the pleasure comes from discovering how it happens?
Once the spine is there, we map the emotional journey.
What is the audience meant to feel at the beginning of each sequence? What should they feel by the end? Where can they get comfortable? Where should they get ahead of the story? Where do we need to keep them behind it? Where does the cost need to land?
A structure without this is a plot summary with act breaks.
With it, you have a design you can actually write toward instead of hoping for the best.
The treatment.
With the map and everything we've discovered so far, we build the treatment.
Present tense. Sequence by sequence. Turns landing where they’ll land in the film.
A treatment has to do more than explain the plot. The reader has to experience the movie.
That's why this document matters.
You can't read rhythm off a synopsis. You can't feel where the tension drops. You can't see whether a turn lands too early, whether a relationship disappears for twenty pages, or whether the emotional payoff has enough pressure behind it.
The treatment is the last stage where major structural change is still cheap, and the first where the film can actually be felt.
rewrite the movie here.
it’s cheaper.
The grid.
If you continue into The Structure, everything above comes together in a single document that runs through the entire story: the grid.
For every sequence, we track the goals and obstacles of the active characters, the switches and fulcrums, changes in status, what the audience feels going in and coming out, and what function the sequence serves.
Every sequence has to answer the same question:
What is this doing for the story?
If we can't answer it, the sequence doesn't earn its place. I'd rather discover that now than in draft two.
From the grid, we build the outline: what belongs in the film, in what order, and why.
A man in a gas mask and his underwear records a confession to his family in the desert, then walks into the road to meet the sirens.
An RV tears through the New Mexico desert. The driver is in a gas mask, an apron and his underwear; two bodies slide around behind him. It runs off the road. He staggers out, points a camcorder at himself and records a message to his wife and son. Then he stands in the middle of the road with a pistol as the sirens come.
A hook, made out of order. It lifts a moment from deep in the story, shows you where an ordinary-sounding premise ends up, then cuts back three weeks so the whole first act plays as a question about how he got there.
To come clean before he is caught. He spends his last free seconds on a confession rather than on an escape.
The cops closing in, and his own guilt. Nothing he can say into a camcorder can undo what he thinks he’s done.
A panicking man in flight ▸ a man who has stopped running and turned to face what’s coming.
Bafflement sharpening into intrigue. You have no idea who this is, and the only way to find out is to keep watching.
What this isn't.
I’m not here to grade your pages.
And it isn’t really notes. Notes happen, of course, but they’re not the product. Notes react to work that already exists.
Here, the work doesn't exist yet.
We're building it.
And it isn't a template. You won't get a formula to force your story through.
Between sessions, you’ll get questions shaped around the story you’re actually telling. I’ll expect you to do the work.
I read what you send two days before we meet.
The hour we have together is for building, not for me catching up.
coverage helpful?
— I haven't.
What you leave with.
In The Foundation, across 9 weeks, you’ll build a treatment you can confidently put in front of a producer, collaborator or potential partner.
In The Structure, over 8 weeks, we turn a treatment into a comprehensive outline: a detailed map of the film where the major dramatic, character and emotional decisions have already been made.
By the time you sit down to write the screenplay, you’re not pausing on page 63 trying to remember what this story actually is.
You already know.
But the documents aren't the only thing you leave with.
You leave with a way of thinking about your own material. How to find the question underneath a problem. How to make a decision when several options seem equally defensible. How to trace a story problem back to its source instead of endlessly rewriting the symptom.
That stays after I'm gone.
Want to see if we're a good fit?
You tell me what you’re working on and where you’re stuck. I listen, ask some questions, and we work out whether this process is right for you.
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