Breaking the Story is an exercise in breaking a single episode of a one-hour drama, with active audience participation. Armed with a white board and marker, Tim Minear guides the class through teaser and act breaks of an episode of the long-running WB hit television show, Angel.

Students lob ideas toward the podium, and the best are rewarded with a place of honor on the whiteboard, where the episode takes shape over the next two hours. Minear listens carefully to every pitch, explaining why some ideas work, and why some will never make it to the board. He steers the group through a process that many professional writers find difficult: creating a story from scratch that services the characters, stays true to a theme, and how to survive getting an idea shot down in a room full of your peers with your ego in tact.

Minear keeps the audience laughing with war stories from his own experiences in writers’ rooms, and follows the exercise with a Q&A session in which he explains how he wrote the spec that landed him a job on The X-Files along with his suggestions for writing a very dark I Love Lucy spec.