Something happened on this week's New Member Workshop that I want to share. And if you're new I want you to read what happened with @Adrian Cranage and @Ameer Ahmed, then I want YOU to show up for our next workshop on Thursday, March 26 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Two writers brought pages to a table read for the first time. Both of them blew us away. That's not a given. But it's what happens when you show up with real work and let the room hear it out loud. There's nothing like that moment. You've been alone with these pages — maybe for years. And then suddenly there are voices. Characters come alive. You hear things land. You hear things that need work. It changes something. Adrian is a cinematographer who spent 30 years behind the camera. The writers' strike hit, the German industry collapsed, and he used that time to finally finish something he'd been carrying for two decades. He scanned 100 pages of handwritten notes into AI — not to write it, to excavate it — and came in deep into a second draft. His pages opened in Bosnia. A war photographer. A dead child. A moral question that James can't answer and a camera he can't raise. The room went quiet. The feedback: these characters have a life before the plot begins. You can't fake that. Ameer is a year out of Full Sail and brought a short he's been developing since school — 13th draft. It's called How to Spell. A teenage girl named Jesse, a dangerous home, and magic. Not metaphor-magic. Real magic. She trains herself in secret, then uses what she's learned to confront the man terrorizing her family. Think Chronicle — superpowers grounded in where you're from and what you're living through — but with a young woman at the center. The title lands by the end. The conversation shifted fast to what this becomes as a feature. If you haven't been on one of these calls, this is what you're missing.

Had an idea this morning while flying to NY. The 2 coaching sessions this week were electric — both writers broke through in ways that made me stop and think: what exactly am I teaching when I do this? So I ran the transcripts through ChatGPT and Claude to see what patterns they found in my coaching. After years of instinct, it finally clicked: what I’m teaching isn’t structure — it’s emotional authorship. How to write from your characters instead of about them. How to find the wound that shaped them, the lie that protects them, and the truth the story exists to expose. That’s the forge — the moment when a writer stops moving characters around the board and starts feeling what drives them. So here’s the experiment: Can AI be trained to help writers Forge Creativity, Not Replace It? I know — AI is the third rail of the creative world right now. But this isn’t about replacing writers. It’s about revealing them. I’m calling it The Primal Forge GPT. It’s not a note bot. It’s not a formula machine. It’s a tool trained directly on how I coach writers — to help you uncover the wound, lie, and truth that make a character come alive. The goal isn’t polished pages. It’s to get unstuck — to feel what’s really driving your story, the emotional engine beneath the plot. If you’re curious, drop a logline, a scene, or even a full treatment into The Primal Forge GPT and see what happens. This is just an experiment, so it might totally fail. No worries if it does — that’s part of what we teach here. Don’t be afraid to charge headlong down rabbit holes that might lead nowhere. Even a dead end is good data. If a few of you want to try it as a brainstorming or journaling tool and share honest feedback — useful or annoying — I’d love to hear it. This is just one of many tools I hope to experiment with and bring you in the coming weeks. Click here for The Primal Forge GPT. Let’s see if we can teach a machine to help us find more humanity in our own stories. 🔥