Passion for your story is a key virtue, constantly in demand from just about every script executive worth their pay cheque. That's because a script that is cleverly, even perfectly, executed but written without passion will lie dead on the page.

This lesson gives you immensely practical tricks and techniques to help you find the story you're most interested in writing: the story you are most passionate about.

The hero and the villain (or protagonist and antagonist) are the two key characters in your story. You need both- and they both need to be astonishing.

In fact, to make the most of it all, they should be locked together in an escalating battle that runs to the end of your script.

In this lesson I give you precise methods for working out who they are, and what they're fighting about. This gives you the best possible story for your characters.

And though this sounds like the recipe for the next Die Hard movie, in fact it's essential stuff for any script, any genre. I've used it for TV cop shows, for psycho-drama based stage plays, for episodes of children's science fiction, for low impact single dramas about the difficulties of living with mental disability or an abusive childhood.

It's a truly universal structure for your story, it works anywhere, and you really need to know it.

There are four key moments you need to hit in just every story worth telling. How the story begins, how it twists, and twists again, and then how it ends.

In this lesson I tell you why these moments are important, how and why they work and where to put them.

I'll show you exactly how to find them, and how best to use them so that your story has the best, most solid foundations.

I'm going to show you why going out and talking to people is so valuable, and why this often-overlooked stage is actually one of the most important ways you can make your script stand out from the herd. It's also a fantastic source for story material. I describe tactics you can use to get access you might think are out of bounds - and how to research stories at first hand that might seem impossible, like science fiction or historical drama.

This is a small but key stage that ensures you are making the most of all the work you have done so far. It brings your story so far into line with the findings of your research.

Constructing the beat sheet is the key stage in my writing process. It's the story, written at quite a high level, without specific scenes or dialogue. It's crucial to have some idea of this before you start writing - I don't know many professional writers who would start work without some form of beat sheet.

This lecture introduces the idea, the following four lectures help you get the best possible beat sheet in place for your story.

"Logline" on this course means a kind of controlling idea. This is an idea that focuses you on what's important - and which will always nudge you back on track when you get stuck.

It's basically a way of thinking about your story that distills what you are writing down to its absolute essence.

There are many different ways of writing a logline. I show you my own method - a very simple formula that works for any commercial script. Once you have this worked out then you will always know which bits of your story belong, and which can be thrown away.

This section gives you a shape for the first quarter of your story. It's quite prescriptive, and yet gives you enormous freedom within that.

It's a shape rather than a formula: in the way that all tables are different yet all are recognisable as tables, if you use this shape for your Act 1 then you will be sure that your story will have a great foundation.

This continues with the description of how to build your beat sheet. It focuses on the middle 50% of your story - the famous Act 2, wherein many writers sink, never to be found!

Not as prescriptive as Lecture 9, with a more subtle, more underground shape, this lecture allowa your artistic ideas full and free reign.

It includes several ideas for beats that you will find incredibly useful at various key stages in your Act 2.

How to build your story to a massive climax, and deliver a knockout punch on the audience.

Once again, the lecture gets into the specific nitty-gritty of what kind of beat goes where - and why!

Well-rounded minor characters are a much-neglected part of many writers' repertoires, so if yours stand out you will have yet another massive advantage over the competition.

This lesson describes a simple method for creating highly memorable minor characters.

I don't believe in writing pages of back story for your lead characters.

I believe it's vital that you know them, that you empathise with them, that you understand their desires, their hates, their joys and their agonies - and yet I also believe there are far more reliable, far more efficient ways of getting to that point than writing a ten page essay about their school days.

This section is all about a very practical method for getting that deep knowledge about your character in the most efficient and most useful way.

Another small-yet-vital stage of self-assessment that you must carry out before you move on to the next stage.

This stage is all about how you judge whether what you have so far is working.

This stage is a transition from the beginning, more analytic, stages, into a place of rich, deep imagination, and is the point at which you move into a more fully realised version of your story, taking your beat sheet and expanding it into a fully formed prose version of itself - a treatment.

You do this because, again, it's the most efficient way of getting to that end goal - a great script.

Skipping this stage is possible, but given that you get paid for each script you complete, you don't really want to be wasting months spinning your wheels and redrafting scene after scene.

Writing the treatment in the way I describe here is the simplest, most effective way of ensuring you are taking the fastest route to having your script finished and out on the market.

So you see, in a professional process perhaps 80% of the work is done before you ever write a scene or a line of dialogue! That ensures that when you come to write the script, it flows as smoothly as is humanly possible. There will be surprises, of course there will - it wouldn't be a creative process without surprises, but hopefully if you've done the preceding work any surprises will make your script better, not throw a hand grenade into the machinery!

Writing the dialogue is the place in the process that is most about your pure artistry. This Lesson is a set of rules of thumb, techniques and general considerations for when you are actually writing your scenes and dialogue, to help you avoid the rookie mistakes that doom so many scripts from new writers.

This summarises the entire course - where we've been, what you've been through, and what you've (hopefully) learned.

It also gives you a Writer-In-A-Hurry method that you can use if you really truly don't have the time for the full method.

There's a glossary, and some useful links that will give you constantly updated job leads and tons of free scripts to read, including scripts and treatments for a lot of the popular movies and TV shows out there.