Erik Bork's THE IDEA course

This course is about learning fundamental foundational principles to support a lifelong writing practice, not about getting feedback on one script or idea. It will transform your approach to generating and developing ideas and help you to be much more successful with what you choose to write. It will lead to better ideas that one could take to other courses (or to Erik) for more one-on-one feedback, after you’ve learned, internalized and applied these principles from this course to your idea generation and development process.

The course takes what’s in the book and organizes it into specific targeted lessons with activities that ask the student to prove the content of the lessons to themselves by examining how successful films apply them, and to then answer targeted challenging prompts that force the writer to examine their own work more critically through the targeted lens of each individual lesson (35 total).

This course is about transforming your approach to coming up with ideas for projects in general, to form a foundation to your creative process that gives you a much better chance at success. It gives you tools to work with on every project and idea moving forward. It’s not just about getting feedback on one script but about revolutionizing your overall approach. The feedback Erik would give you on your script would mostly be about the areas covered in the course and where he thinks your script falls short as an idea, but would not be nearly as comprehensive compared to how those precepts are explored in the course. And the course is more about applying that understanding to make your script and other future projects better, rather than just hearing about how one script might fall short.

The course is designed to challenge students to a new and higher level of self-assessment using targeted challenging prompts and questions about their idea that force thinking about it from a different perspective, and move writers toward building a lifelong habit of getting outside their ideas and looking at them through a more critical and objective lens than they’ve done before.

This course is not just about theory but about application of each of its 35 lessons to ideas and projects you’re working on now. The main work of the course lies in its activities with each lesson that systematically guide the writer through evaluating and revising their work so it comes into alignment with the principles being taught and becomes something much more likely to interest professionals when they read the work. And this is the key to success as a screenwriter -- almost all of it lies in the idea selection, understanding of what makes a good story, and application of that (not in getting it to the “right people.”)

The problem with random free tips is it’s hard to organize them into an action plan and have the motivation and structure to do so successfully. This course is designed to lead students in a systematic way through an understanding of Erik’s unique approach to testing and developing ideas, which goes far beyond his blog or even his book in its precepts and in how writers are challenged to apply them step by step to their ideas and projects.