Writing a Story: the art of captivating people through storytelling

Course description

Storytelling is not just for writers. It is for whoever needs to present an idea in a salient manner. If you want to discover the potential of creating a well-told story, if you want to learn how to engage, persuade and inspire people, this course is for you.

You will learn storytelling skills to present ideas in a successful way. What’s the key to setting people on fire? Uniting an idea with an emotion! Martin Scorsese said that “a director is a manager of emotions”: you can learn the same writing and cinematic techniques to captivate people.

We will analyze these techniques “in action” through screenwriting, and in particular through a pillar of Hollywood, Cinecittà, and the television networks: Adaptations. We will analyze important adaptations of novels and true-life stories for the seventh art, understanding the changes from the source material to the new text and identifying the resistance of literature and true-life story.

This course includes a creative experience: the writer’s lab. Each student will be given tools to create compelling characters, a well-told story, shading style, and mood, and to write short film scripts.