Collaborating with Tom Schlesinger is worth its weight in gold!
—Paul Saltzman, award-winning filmmaker, “Prom Night in Mississippi”
Tom Schlesinger, UCLA, MFA Theater Arts
Story Coach | Neuroscience Storytelling Consultant / Screenwriter
Transforming Research into Story
Tom Schlesinger is an internationally respected story coach and educator operating at the intersection of neuroscience, justice, and transformational storytelling. With a background in theater arts (MFA, UCLA) and decades of experience in film, television, and documentary, Tom assists scientists, clinicians, and creative professionals in crafting emotionally compelling narratives that connect intellect and empathy.
He recently gave a talk at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Conference in Chicago, inspiring researchers to translate complex data into stories that engage, persuade, and heal. His unique approach is helping neuroscience labs, medical centers, and research institutions reframe how they communicate with the public, policymakers, and funders.
Tom has served as story coach on multiple acclaimed films, including Prom Night in Mississippi (HBO, with Morgan Freeman), A Small Act (HBO), and Caroline Link’s Oscar-winning Nowhere in Africa. He teaches narrative strategy at Pixar, Disney, Lucasfilm, Red Bull, and the American Film Institute, and leads international workshops such as Art as Transformation at UCLA and The Writer’s Room Experience at the International Film School in Cologne, Germany.
Tom’s mission is to empower storytellers in every field to shape stories that entertain, spark social change, and awaken consciousness. Contact: tfilm23@gmail.com, 424.268.6862
Tom works with Creative Teams at
Tom works with Creative Teams at
New York Film Academy—The 20/20 Series with Screenwriter Tom Schlesinger
Tom’s Writer’s Room Experience
Develop your film, novel or television series through a proven collaborative process.
Development Showrunner Tom Schlesinger’s Writer’s Room Experience is a four-week story incubator from July 1 – 29, 2025. Please contact Tom at tfilm23@gmail.com for a discovery call to talk about your participation in the room.
These workshops are differentiators, utilizing strategies to develop series like Breaking Bad and Homeland while enhancing essential team-building and leadership skills. This creates sustainable creative teams for future projects since team players in Writers’ Rooms often become leaders. This was exemplified in the writer’s room for The Sopranos, where staff writer Matthew Weiner became the creator and showrunner of Mad Men, while X-Files staff writer Vince Gilligan became the creator and showrunner of Breaking Bad.
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The Writers Room Experience methodology includes presentations with video clip examples, creative team story-generating exercises, improvisation, Story Constellations*, Story Mapping**, and the Storyteller’s Playbook***
The screenwriting exercises are inspired by Tom’s teachers: Jean Houston (The Possible Human), Eugene Gendlin (Focusing), Maureen Murdock (The Heroine’s Journey), Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones), Eckhardt Tolle (The Power of Now), Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces), Neil Landau (The TV Showrunners Roadmap) and Pema Chödrun (When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times).
PARTICIPANTS WILL LEARN HOW:
- The meaning of your stories connects you to your audience
- The Creative Team is on parallel emotional journeys with their characters and ultimately, their audience
- Films and TV Series can be mapped by exploring the synergy of plot, character and theme throughout dramatic time
- The richer and more comprehensive the source material, the greater the number of multi-platform expressions
- Story structure is based on how stories function
- Story Structure is based what the audience learns and feels while viewing.
- Your story structure is defined by the genre or genre mix
- Solution-oriented stories are more engaging for the audience
TAKEAWAYS: STORYTELLING TOOLS
- The Dramedy and Heroine’s Journey video workshops and support materials.
- The Writers Room Playbook
- The Mythic Journey, Story Molecule and Plot Energy Curve Models.
The basic “Seven Steps to Writers Room Success” curriculum for this workshop follows next. Each Writers Room Experience is designed according to the specific group’s needs. I suggest we put the focus on Drama with Comedy, sometimes inaptly called ‘dramedies’.
An example of the Writers Room Playbook completes this document after the curriculum.
THE SEVEN STEPS TO WRITERS ROOM SUCCESS:
1. CONNECTING WITH YOUR AUDIENCE: THE MYTHIC JOURNEY
The four Archetypal stages of the creative process: Separation, Descent, Initiation and Return
- Be true to your feeling experience, bodily felt experience
- Find the story beneath the story: what appears to be happening vs. what’s really happening.
- Discover how theme is revealed through archetypal relationships like brother-sister, father-daughter, mother-son, etc.
Experience how you, the storyteller, resonate with the archetypal themes in your story, which is how you connect with your audience
THE MYTHIC JOURNEY: a path of growth through crisis
2. BUILDING RICH SOURCE MATERIAL
Learn how:
- Source Material is the foundation of your multi-platform storytelling expressions;
- Source Material is the research and development that defines the physical world or worlds of your story, the back-story, the emotional network of characters and intimations of the theme (what is this story about?)
- The multi-purpose Source Material is the foundation for producing documentaries, feature films, television series and web series.
THE PLOT ENERGY CURVE: Structure is the order in which the audience learns and feel things.
3. KNOWING HOW STORIES FUNCTION: “FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION”
Experience how:
- Meaning comes through the contrast and opposition of:
- Worlds in contrast and people in opposition
- While establishing locations to reflect the emotional states of the audience while watching the film.
- Worlds in contrast and people in opposition
And how:
- Dilemmas are at the creative core of storytelling
- Dilemma is the choice between two things that both have positive values.
- Dilemmas are expressed through Core Triangles of Characters
- Relationships reveal vulnerability, raise the stakes and present a wide range of emotional experiences for the audience.
- To create a wide range of emotional experiences, ask: what is the angriest, saddest, most proud, ashamed, joyful, moments for the audience?
4. SEEING HOW UNIVERSAL THEMES CONNECT YOU TO YOUR AUDIENCE
- The archetypal themes are expressed through relationships
- Is there an archetypal primary familial relationship, like brother and sister or mother and son?
- Ask: what will the audience learn in the end?
5. UTILIZING HOW STRUCTURE IS BASED ON THE AUDIENCE’S EXPERIENCE
Experience how:
- Structure is the order in which the audience learns and feels thing.
- Structure is a holographic system based on the relationship between plot, character and theme.
- To define the genre and the palette of tones, ask:
- How deep? How dark? How real? How close? (POV).
Stories are a series of interconnected Movements: Establishing, Catalyst, Threshold Crisis, Core Crisis, Catastrophe and Climax
- Establishing/Opening: something’s missing. Exclusion creates desire.
- Desire Lines unfold through time via relationship to world(s) and other characters
- Catalyst raises questions on three levels of the story molecule
- Threshold Crisis is the first show of response by the antagonist network
- the relationship arcs are catalyzed in Act 2, and correspond to the Descent Stage of the Hero’s Journey.
- Core Crisis is an outer event that creates a crisis in the primary relationship
- Catastrophe is when it appears the main character will not reach her plot goal and relationship goals.
- It appears that the antagonist has won
- Climax is the dramatic answer to the three Story Molecule questions of plot, character, and theme.
THE STORY MOLECULE: a systematic web of plot, character and theme
6. SEEING HOW YOUR STORY IS SCULPTED BY THE GENRE OR GENRE-MIX
- Genre is based on how you perceive and find meaning in the world.
- Learn how the comedy, thriller and family genres have their own subset of structural.
7. UNDERSTANDING HOW YOUR STORY IMPACTS THE AUDIENCE RESOLUTION
- Resolution means that the audience perceives the thematic issues raised in a new way: through an emotional triumph
- See how solution-based storytelling is more engaging than problem-based storytelling
- Is the story life-affirming or life-negating? Life affirming stories are about characters overcoming difficulties
- The audience experiences an emotional triumph at the end.
***
THE WRITERS ROOM PLAYBOOK
STORY-BUILDING QUESTIONS FOR YOUR WRITERS ROOM TEAM:
These questions are based on how stories function and guide your team to creating a “bible” for your series of stories.
- How do we create meaning through contrast and opposition (differing worlds, cultures, viewpoints, locations etc.)?
- What is the consistent Palette of Tones throughout the series? (Ask: How deep? How dark? How real? How close?)
- What is the main dilemma each central character is experiencing?
- How can mythic structure and archetypal feeling states chart the audience’s emotional experience while watching the film?
- What are the archetypal themes we share with the characters and ultimately the audience?
- What is the genre or hybrid genre?
- What are the plot arcs and relationship arcs that engage the audience in the pilot and provide the through-line for the series? What are the corresponding plot and relationship arcs for each season?
- What are the triangles of characters that deepen the viewer’s emotional engagement through the Rule of Three?
- How do we skillfully reveal exposition and back-story without slowing the story momentum?
- What is the Storytelling Structure that will best express the franchise?
- How do we implement solution-based storytelling rather than problem-centered storytelling and what is the audience’s intended response?
Writers Room Experience & Playbook
© 2020
by Tom Schlesinger
all rights reserved
About Tom
While on a pre-med scholarship at the University of Illinois, I watched Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—films that didn’t just move me, they redirected my life. I left medicine behind to pursue storytelling, earning an MFA in Theatre Arts from UCLA.
Early on, I optioned my first two screenplays and shared them with Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood. But when the projects stalled, I questioned my path—until a lecture by mythologist Joseph Campbell reignited my purpose. His words sparked a lifelong passion for stories that transform.
I trained with Jean Houston, a leading expert in the psychology of creativity, and began teaching storytelling as a vehicle for personal and social change—at UCLA, Esalen, and across Europe and North Africa. I later collaborated with Oscar-winning director Caroline Link on Nowhere in Africa and Beyond Silence, and co-created documentaries with Paul Saltzman, including Prom Night in Mississippi with Morgan Freeman and The Last White Knight with Harry Belafonte.
These experiences shaped my approach: powerful stories—whether fictional or true—move people at their emotional core. Today, I bring this philosophy into the world of neuroscience. I work with researchers, neurologists, and patient advocates to help translate complex medical breakthroughs into emotionally compelling narratives. Whether at the Society for Neuroscience or inside a writers’ room, I teach how story structure, emotional truth, and character resonance can heal, inspire, and ignite change.
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Success Stories
Tom’s extraordinary guidance on my scripts for “Nowhere in Africa” and “Beyond Silence” enriched my award-winning films immensely.
Tom is the best: full stop!
Tom’s wisdom, inspiration, and deep understanding of character and story continue to guide me on each screenwriting journey.
Working with Tom Schlesinger is worth its weight in gold!
I think I learned more about storytelling from Tom at the workshop than I learned in my last 10 years stumbling through my career.
Tom helped me focus on possibilities instead of limitations. His qualities as a guide cannot be valued enough, not to mention that he is a great guy, and tremendous fun to work with!
I would HIGHLY recommend Tom to anyone involved in visual storytelling.
Tom has a keen sense of the “big picture.” His insight allowed us to envision structure and effective character arcs in the early stages of development — important assets in creating a great screenplay.
Tom has the amazing ability to guide writers to a place of enhanced creativity.
Tom has a very unique approach to story and I’m extremely grateful to have had his guidance.
Attending Tom’s workshop was a creative turning point for me as a documentary filmmaker.
The first thing I did when I began writing was to pick up the phone and call Tom. I can’t think of a more insightful and inspiring “wing man”. He truly guides me to do my best work.
Tom is a master in working with dichotomies: logic and emotion, brain and heart, body and soul… my characters came alive as we found the optimal structure for my script.
Collaborating with Tom has been absolutely essential for me and, aside from his sheer intellectual input, so much fun!