Let Your Darlings Live

Service Description

Let your Darling Live is a screenwriting course designed to be engaging for both beginners and intermediate students, regardless of whether they have original screenplay ideas or are looking to adapt from prose. If you’ve never written a screenplay, this is a great place to start, and if you’ve written a few, this is a great place to start a new project, get feedback and hone your skills. From the inkling of an idea to mastering the format, to a final outline and first draft of a short script, this four-week course will guide you step by step. We will cover craft issues such as voice, tone, character, plot, dialogue, scene and structure. We will also develop projects the way professionals do, by starting with a logline, then synopsis and treatment, then an outline and, finally, a script. Following the end of the course, students will have the option of participating in a public table read of their work by actors. Students will read professional screenplays to analyze how written words translate to the final audiovisual product. In-class writing assignments will help students unblock creativity and practice specific skills. Through the workshop component, students will share their work and everyone will contribute to the development of everyone else’s story. Although this course focuses on the writing of screenplays for short films (15 pages, max), the problem-solving intelligence students will develop will also be useful for writing television, and we will discuss how to figure out if your story is best suited for film or TV. Necessary material: Laptop computer or similar. We have two openings for virtual participation in this class. Please contact jennifer@porchlightliterary.org if you would like to take one of those spots. Camila Urioste Bio Camila Urioste graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 2025 and is a Bolivian-Uruguayan writer of novels and screenplays. In Bolivia she published poetry and fiction, winning a national award for her first novel, Soundtrack, in 2017. She holds an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and her second novel, Manqapacha Delight, was published in Bolivia in 2024. She co-wrote the film Muralla (Gory Patiño, 2018), the series La Entrega (Patiño, 2019) and the film Influenced (Fernanda Rossi, 2024). She also co-wrote the first season of the web series Decoded, produced by Al Jazeera, starring Amr Waked. She is the 2025-2026 Iowa Writer’s Room Screenwriting Fellow.