Go Into The Story: 2017 Schedule

What you may expect from the blog in the upcoming year.

2016 was another year in which GITS mixed old and new. We continued some series which have become familiar companions through our journeys together since 2008: On Writing, Screenwriting 101, Reader Questions, and of course Daily Dialogue.

We featured some recurring contests such as a Scene-Writing Challenge and Dialogue-Writing Challenge, both of which featured my Core and Craft online classes as prizes. A variety of Black List contests, plus I gave away dozens of free tickets to Writers Guild Foundation events.

We expanded our decade by decade analysis of classic movies now covering the 30s-90s as well as classic international films. We also continued the script reading series including the scene-by-scene breakdown initiative.

We followed up on the inaugural Zero Draft Thirty Challenge in November 2015 with two more in 2016: March and September.

And in the fall, we moved from Word Press to Medium which has been received with nearly universal acclaim by GITS readers.

So I’m sitting here looking at the calendar for 2017 and I’d like your suggestions. I prefer to have one signature series per month as an anchor, generally going live at Noon Eastern / 9AM Pacific. I’ve got 10 of the 12 months for next year pretty much locked down:

January: Dialogue Writing Challenge. 20 prompts, 20 opportunities to hone your dialogue-writing chops for which I give away a free Craft class (writing practice) to participants.

February: Classic Drama Movies. Building on our successful decade series, I will solicit volunteers to write short takes on their favorite films in the drama genre.

March: Zero Draft Thirty Challenge: Spring 2017. Fade In to Fade Out in a month. Knock out your first spec script of the year.

April: A Story Idea Each Day for a Month. 30 days, 30 story ideas which I’m giving away for free. 8th consecutive years for this series!

May: Scene Writing Challenge. 20 prompts, 20 opportunities to hone your scene-writing chops for which I give away a free Core class (writing theory) to participants.

June: Classic Science Fiction Movies. I’ll be seeking writers to provide a brief, but informative analysis of a favorite sci-fi film to add to our series.

July: Movies You Made. The blog’s month-long celebration of your cinematic creativity as we feature movies, long and short, a virtual film festival.

August: GITS Interviews Greatest Hits. 31 straight days of some of my most notable interviews with screenwriters, filmmakers, and industry insiders.

September: Zero Draft Thirty Challenge: Fall 2017. Your opportunity to pound out a second spec script next year.

October: Classic Horror Movies. Of course, we need to expand our series to include this genre in the month leading up to Halloween.

November: 30 Days of Screenplays. I’d like to reprise this series I ran back in 2009 and 2010. Challenge people to read 30 notable movie scripts in a month. A great way to really up your learning curve with regard to the craft.

December: Reflect on 2017 / Plan for 2018. I’ve done this every year for the last several years and it’s quite popular. Back again to up our productivity.

There will be the usual suspects on the blog post front so you can look forward to 4–5 new items per day. Plus I’ve got a lot of interviews lined up, so you can look forward to 20+ conversations with some exciting talent including all five 2016 Nicholl Fellowship winners and a bunch of Black List writers.

And there’s this: Each month, I will be making available a downloadable PDF of some of my most popular blog series. It’s another way to make the GITS resources as usable and helpful as possible. Oh, yeah. Each PDF will be free! Look for the first one to drop on January 9! Profound thanks to Trish Curtin and Clay Mitchell for their enormous help with this initiative.

For the 8th consecutive year there were over 1,000,000 unique visits to the blog and over 2,000,000 page views. Plus in just about 2 months since the move to Medium, the site already has gathered over 5K+ followers. On Twitter, it’s 42K+ followers. And on May 16, 2017, the blog will celebrate its 9th birthday. If I can manage to keep the streak alive, that would be 3,288 consecutive days of blog posts.

These numbers may not mean much to you, but they do to me. Go Into The Story is a true labor of love. I don’t earn a dime doing it. But not a week goes by where I don’t receive an email, two, or three from writers who tell me how much the site means to them, many of them having broken into the business and achieved some measure of financial success through their writing, thus, seeing their dreams come true.

The knowledge what we do here helps writers, especially those who are outside the system, live far away from L.A., and need some form of contact with the industry to sustain their creative development, is hugely meaningful to me.

So as we get ready to close the books on another year, I thank you for being a part of the GITS community. As always, if you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to post a RESPONSE or email me (GITSblog at gmail dot com).

What a long, strange — and wonderful — trip it’s been.

Onward!