BLOG
About Contact

 The Screenwriter’s Guide to Getting Unstuck and Finishing the Damn Thing 

Every writer stalls out. The pages stack up, the story meanders, and that g.d. cursor blinks like a dare.

This workbook shows you how to break through. 

Jumpstart Your Script is 50+ pages of slam-dunk, kapow insight from a working screenwriter with decades in the business who uses words like kapow to keep your attention. The guide is a lean, practical way to get unstuck. And it lets you inside the writers' room to learn the questions TV and film writers ask each other to whip their stories into shape 

✨ What You’ll Work Through

Six QUESTIONS you need to ask,

with worksheets and examples of ANSWERS.

  • Concept: What’s the story really about?
  • Character: What does your protagonist truly want?
  • Conflict: What stands in the way?
  • Structure: Where’s the spine?
  • World: What makes it lived-in?
  • Pitch: Can you tell it without sweating?

✨ What You’ll Get

  1. Printable & fillable PDF format, for both planners and procrastinators
  2. Vetted, expert-level advice on how to rework structure, strengthen characters, and shape a story that sells
  3. Tons of examples pulled from current and legacy award-winning shows and movies that highlight character, structure, plot points, and setting. 
  4.  A gorgeously designed, readable book you'll refer to again and again
  5.  Bullshit-free ideas to get you back to the keyboard or to pick up that pen again. 

✨ How It Works 

Learn what works by studying award-winning TV series and films.

     🎬 With examples in comedy, drama, adventure, sci-fi in film and television such asTed Lasso, The Queen’s Gambit, Barbie, Anora, Fleabag, and Succession (to name only a few) you’ll see how stories are told through character, world and structure. And how your story can be built bigger, better, stronger, too.
 

 ✨ Who It's For

  You. If you're blocked. If you're rewriting. If you're overwhelmed.

  • Screenwriters stumped by the midpoint in Act Two
  • Professionals wrestling with studio notes
  • Writers wrassling with a deadline while feeling bad about themselves, even though they have an honest-to-god assignment and they've wanted a deadline for ages and now they have one and they're bitching about it
  • Emerging writers who need that extra push
 

Written by Dawn DeKeyser


Dawn has written and produced hundreds of episodes of network TV, from Ugly Betty, Becker, Newsradio, Good Witch, The Client List, Signed Sealed Delivered, The Gourmet Detective, and many more. 

She's pitched to the network studios and streamers, sold pilots to NBC, ABC, CBS, Hallmark, Lifetime - just to name a few. She's been in dozens of writers' rooms, in edit bays, and soundstages, and rose through the ranks from Executive Story Editor to Executive Producer.

She created this workbook to help you stop spinning and start finishing.