The Voice Class || NOVEMBER 3
THE VOICE CLASS || SIX WEEK MASTER CLASS
COURSE:
A Six Week Online Master Screenwriting Course
Studying with Max Adams
Course Dates: 01.06.26 || 11.03.26
Course Fee: $475
Course Location: ONLINE
The Voice Class is a six week online master screenwriting course studying voice with author and award winning screenwriter Max Adams.
Nothing sells in Hollywood like VOICE. Nothing. And if you have everything else down, story, structure, character, dialogue, plot — and still aren’t getting attention? You might be missing VOICE. But that can be fixed.
During six weeks of advanced study, students will analyze produced scripts and film clips provided in class, complete advance course assignments and exercises, and participate in weekly online discussions reviewing and analyzing course materials and assignments with Max Adams.
*This is a page and reading intensive class. Be sure you have pages, and are ready to do some reading before signing up for The Voice Class.
COURSE SYLLABUS:
WEEK ONE: A Study of Voice ||
Lecture: Voice Sells & Here’s Why
WEEK TWO: Voice & the Writer’s Vocabulary ||
Lecture: Their Narrative Voice, Your Narrative Voice, We All Have Narrative Voice
WEEK THREE: Voice, Tone & Genre ||
Supporting Tone & Genre With Voice
WEEK FOUR: Voice And Character ||
Lecture: Differentiating Between Narrative Voice & Character Voice
WEEK FIVE: Voice, Pacing & Clarity ||
Lecture: Voice Alone Cannot Carry a Story, But it Sure Helps
WEEK SIX: Voice & the Pitch ||
Lecture: Narrative Voice & How It Carries Over Into the Pitch
WEEK SEVEN: Grace Week ||
No Lecture
WE WILL BE COVERING:
- The Masters, what works, what doesn’t — and how that relates to you.
- The five models, where is your voice on the voice metric, and how to use & strengthen it
- Cadence, rhythm & narrative flow
- Genre and tone and how voice supports or damages them
- Creating and sustaining tension and pacing with narrative voice
- Authorial Intrusion — when it’s your friend, and when it isn’t
- Backing up authorial intrusion for the reader & ditching metaphors when they hurt instead of help
- Pacing & the one word sentence
- Pacing and how voice can improve — or mute — it
- Voice & the Pitch, how they back up or undermine each other
- Why five dollars words are not your friend
- And more —
YOU WILL TAKE AWAY:
- Actionable craft tools that, implemented in your own scripts’ narrative, will immediately up the impact of your existing & future feature and television scripts, improving the response to your material from readers and industry professionals considering material for option, purchase, development, attachment and production.
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Ratings and Reviews
Joan Philo
This is the class that will put a stamp on your writing as a writer to read and to work with. My classmates and I loved this class so much that we asked for a Voice 2 class to work on our scripts—this evolved from one of our outstanding class discussions, which we have for each class. It’s breakthrough-worthy and the best class I have ever taken! Max is an excellent teacher!
5 people found this helpful.
Gary Weskrna
Voice is so crucial and yet an under addressed aspect of writing. I believed that you'e either one of the lucky ones who have it or your not. I had no clue I could find and develop a writng voice. This class help clarify what it is, what it's not and how to develop it. This class is truly indespensible if you want to become a profesional writer. It could be the last missing piece you need!
5 people found this helpful.
Leah Baxter
Max cleared up my confusion so that I now understand what voice is. And I learned how to lean into my own voice and tell a story with style and confidence! I believe this is the difference between a script that gets attention and one that doesn’t. I can hardly wait to write my next script like an in-demand Hollywood writer!
5 people found this helpful.
Peter Andrews
The class came to be at exactly the right time. Writing in other genres had lured me into spare impersonal narration instead of the full color, personal voice that's essential in scripts. Script readers need to be captured and charmed. The writer needs to be a storyteller who engages them. In this course, my understanding of how to do this grew, even as a started to recapture my natural voice.
5 people found this helpful.
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, former Nicholl reader and judge, 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 TheAFW — 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.
Max has been writing, selling, mentoring, and teaching for two decades. Four or her workshoppers have won Nicholl Fellowships from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. Many of her students and workshoppers have gone on to option, sell, publish, and produce work.
TESTIMONIALS
Alvaro Rodriguez
Screenwriter
Julie Howe
Screenwriter
I’ve taken all of Max’s classes and quite simply, her focused methods and attention to detail blow every other screenwriting class out of the water.
Debi Yazbeck
Screenwriter/Producer/Director
CK Love
Screenwriter/Author
Tony Ferrendelli
Screenwriter
Tonia Kempler
Screenwriter/Director/Producer
Thank you. You have completely given me confidence and skills I didn’t have before.
Couldn’t have done this without taking your classes.
Toni McGee Causey
Screenwriter/Author
The brilliance of taking Max Adams’ classes is you start seeing improvement in your writing almost immediately.
Gwenda Bond
Screenwriter/Author
Max’s workshop was a transformative experience for me as a young writer.
Dan Goforth
Screenwriter
For a screenwriter, Max Adams’ 5150 Workshop is one of the best things you can do to improve yourself and your work. If you’re lucky enough to catch an open spot,
TAKE IT!!!
Joan Philo
Screenwriter/Casting Director
It’s so big what you are to screenwriting and what you give to others and how you collect and champion writers who do more than write, they produce. That’s huge in this business of writing and what sets you above the rest.
Nancy Bilyeau
Author/Screenwriter
I carried Max’s advice over to my fiction and have now sold & published five novels.
Della Vance Greenawalt
Screenwriter
Max Adams’ classes are the best | have ever taken. In every class I have experienced a “light bulb” moment that raised my scripts to another level.
Great course. Exactly what I needed right now. Max has a way of nailing the nuances of screenwriting w/o making them cookie cutter. In this course we studied some great screenwriters with exceptional voices. I learned much from how these writers craft their own personal voice. More importantly, studying their diverse voices has helped me to find my own.... You gotta take this CLASS!