STRUCTURAL WRITING || ONLINE MASTER COURSE
STRUCTURAL WRITING || ONLINE MASTER COURSE
COURSE:
A Six Week Online Master Screenwriting Course
Studying with Max Adams
Course Dates: WAITING LIST
Course Fee: $475 || Course Deposit: $150
Course Location: ONLINE
Structural Writing is an accelerated screenwriting master class studying online with author & award winning screenwriter Max Adams. During six weeks of advanced study, students will analyze structural models and produced scripts and film clips provided in class, complete advanced course assignments and exercises, and participate in weekly online discussions reviewing and analyzing course materials and structured and revised outline and beat sheet assignments with Max Adams.
*Please use the contact form to send email to be added to the waiting list or sign up for the AFW newsletter to be notified of new course dates.
COURSE SYLLABUS:
WEEK ONE: The Model, The Set Up ||
Lecture: How to Kill a Script in Thirty Pages or Less
WEEK TWO: The Second Act ||
Lecture: Escalation is Your Friend
WEEK THREE: Scene Structure ||
Lecture: Emotional High Points, Use Them or Lose Them
WEEK FOUR: Turning Points ||
Lecture: How to Turn a Scene in Three Sentences or Less
WEEK FIVE: Mystery & Escalation ||
Lecture: Withholding, It Is Not Just for Breakfast
WEEK SIX: Climax ||
Lecture: Protagonist Enclosed, No Batteries Required
WEEK SEVEN: Grace Week ||
No Lecture
WE WILL BE COVERING:
- The myth of the three act structure
- Scene sequencing
- Set up & illumination
- Story launch platforms
- The 15 page first act
- The 30 page first act
- Obstacles, turning points & plot focus
- Beating out the action plot
- Beating out the character driven plot
- Scene length & timing
- Climaxes & plot focus
- Time jumps & story compression
- Dots writing & traveling sequences
- Narrative dramatic tension & escalation
- Turning points & obstacles
- Comedic tension & pacing
- Dramatic tension & pacing
- Why stories slump
- And more —
YOU WILL TAKE AWAY:
- Actionable craft tools that, implemented in your own scripts, will immediately improve your existing & future feature and television scripts, creating a focused well paced story that more fully supports character, dramatic & comedic tension, suspense, plot, pacing and cinematic impact improving reading experience for future readers and industry professionals considering material for option, purchase, development, attachment and production.
RELATED CLASSES
6 week course
THE FIRST 30 PAGES
6 WEEK COURSE
MASTERING STORY MOMENTUM
VIDEO COURSE
MASTERING STORY MOMENTUM
Structural Writing is the most difficult course in the AFW curriculum and is a WAITING LIST CLASS only and admission is more restricted than in other AFW courses. And, in most cases, we will not allow a student to take Structural Writing as a first course.
Please email about Structural Writing before registering. And consider starting with one of the other courses in the structure class set first: The First 30 Pages and/or Mastering Story Momentum.
Questions? Send us email:
Structural Writing Email:
Ratings and Reviews

Your Instructor
MAX ADAMS is an author and award winning screenwriter. She has written for Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Universal Pictures — and a couple others to remain unnamed because no one around here wants to get black listed.
Max is a former volunteer AFI Alumni reader and WGAw online mentor, has appeared as a speaker at, among other places, AMPAS, USC, and Film Arts Foundation, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Utah and a former lecturer & instructor at New York Film Academy, is the author of The Screenwriter’s Survival Guide AND The New Screenwriter’s Survival Guide, is the founder of two international online screenwriting workshops and has the dubious distinction of having been dubbed “Red Hot Adams” by Daily Variety for selling three pitches over a holiday weekend — which made her agents cry.
[In a good way.]
She answers now to both “Max” and “Red Hot” in crowds and dog parks.
Testimonials
Jennifer Mulligan
Screenwriter
Max Adams has been a keen mentor, champion and cheerleader. Her online classes have provided me with very specific and important screenwriting tools. My short script, Minerva’s War, was a 2014 Finalist at the Lady Filmmakers Film Festival in Beverly Hills as a direct result of learning and applying these techniques.
This class took my script from a mediocre script to an award-winning screenplay. Max, is simply the best instructor there is out there. I highly recommend this master class for anyone who is truly serious about their career.