Plot and story structure are real tools. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise — screenwriting is not just intuition alone —

But plot and structure are thinking tools. And when you're trying to get your story onto the page, or adjust it to the endless feedback you'll get as you push it toward the screen, thinking will almost always take you nowhere. It takes you toward quitting. Toward stopping short. Toward judging yourself and your writing into a corner.

Intuitive Outlining is a way to guide a screenwriter from the beginning of their story to the end without conscious reasoning or logic — in a way that is immediately, almost surprisingly, understandable to the writer themselves. Intuitive Outlining requires a writer to come to Session One with me with nothing more than an idea, a few ideas, or even simply a desire to write a story. We launch into curiosity: what is your story about? What's the desire you have to write? Why you and why now?

Though we're not talking about plot — though we're not yet articulating the deeper meaning of your work — something amazing happens: from this intuitive question, the moral dilemma at the heart of your story arises. Through a series of targeted exercises, we examine that dilemma from multiple angles — what's at stake if the character chooses one way, what's at stake if they choose the other, what version of the world would emerge from each ending. How do your protagonist’s choices interact with every story point — not story points as they’re often defined, but story points as they are: meaningful and structural moments in the dramatization of a moral dilemma.

Much of what screenwriting teaching has given us is the notion that depth and plot cannot be linked, but they are — inextricably.

You see, when we take on story with plot point definitions or beats alone, without the heart of what we're writing worn on our sleeve, the power of those points, the power of story structure, becomes useless — predictable, at best.

It's not your fault — Every screenwriter out there knows structure. The ins and outs of three-act, five-act, the beat sheet, the eight-sequence approach — they're available to all of us, both strictly defined and loosely formed. Intuitive Outlining isn't a teaching of the same thing. It's a means of approaching the same thing that actually works.

Your problem isn't that you misunderstand structure. Your problem isn't that you're lazy or that you can't outline. You can.

Your problem is that you've been asked to apply structural tools to a story you don't yet know. You've been asked to identify your inciting incident as “a moment that sets your story in motion” rather than as an inevitability of a deep-seated moral dilemma. You've been asked to find your midpoint before you know what your character is wrestling with. The structure isn't broken. The order of operations is.

Intuitive Outlining doesn’t change the order of how you form your story; it expedites it. You see, the structural tools provide you with something to work on — they suddenly start truly working — when they’re combined or met with how and why you want to entertain your audience.

And Intuitive Outlining is the foundation of a larger system I call Story as Language. It's the playing of the scales for a screenwriter — the practice that has to come before everything else — my full Story as Language Signature Course, where you’ll write three drafts of your screenplay in four months, and my project development course Leaning Into Genius, where you’ll package that screenplay into a series of materials ready for producers, financiers, festival development labs, and more.

Writers and filmmakers who work with me experience the natural progression from Intuitive Outlining to Story as Language and Leaning Into Genius, from intuitively understanding their story to executing the writing of that story to organizing it into a cohesive package for collaborators.

Intuitive Outlining and Story as Language are for serious writers — writers who want to invest in their craft for the long term, not for the next 30 days.

And Leaning Into Genius is a course designed for writers and filmmakers who aren’t afraid to take their work to the next level and get it in front of people with the means to make it.

If you're stuck. If you've tried other methods and felt something was missing. If you're a first-time writer who wants to write something that makes a real impact, not just a throwaway work. If you're a working writer searching for new depths in your work — Intuitive Outlining is for you.

This isn't a "one weird trick" method. It isn't "you don't need plot, just feeling," and it isn't the inverse. These are techniques meant to last the length of your creative and professional career.

And it all begins with an Intuitive Outlining session, where you'll intuitively come to a clear understanding of where your story starts, culminates, and ends. It's often an emotional and revelatory session. Filmmaker Michael Parks Randa remarked in that first session, "This is nothing like any screenwriting course I've taken before," and filmmaker duo Taylor Hinds and Savannah Sivert called it a "Spirit Quest” —

Tears are often shed as stories unfold before the writer's eyes.

Writers have left with work that has quickly placed at major screenwriting festivals, gotten financed, earned agency representation, and more —

As Signal Award-Winning and published writer Nora Kipnis said of the method, "The Story as Language approach to writing can't be found elsewhere... rather than prescribing structure, he worked with me on tools and approaches that allowed me to see my work in a new way."

Ready to find your story?

Book an Intuitive Outlining Session — $450 — and experience the method firsthand.

Or schedule a free 20-minute consultation to discuss the full Story as Language coaching engagement.