Thinking Cinematically: A Visual Approach to Scene and Story

Every scene you write is a series of choices about distance and camera placement. How close are you to your subject? How much does the reader see? When do you pull back — and when do you move in so close the reader can hear someone breathing?

Spend a week on the coast of Maine learning a cinematic approach to writing — a visual framework borrowed from filmmakers and adapted for the page. In this generative workshop, journalist, author, and lyric essayist Maggie Messitt shares the method at the center of her own writing practice: a set of tools for visualizing scenes, narrative, character development, and structure. Having grown up alongside a filmmaker, this isn't a borrowed method so much as the form that shaped her as a storyteller and shapes the way she sees and writes. Working with the positions of close-up, medium shot, and long shot, writers learn to storyboard their scenes, map the architecture of a larger narrative, and see their characters in dimension — making visible the choices they're already making intuitively, and discovering how many more are available to them.

This workshop is for prose writers at any stage — fiction and nonfiction alike. Novelists, short story writers, memoirists, essayists: anyone working in scene. Come with a project in progress or come ready to generate new material. Either way, the week will give you a new set of tools, and the time and community to put them to work. Messitt has returned to this method across every book, piece of narrative reportage, essay, and podcast script she's written, and has watched it unlock scenes and new structures for writers across every genre.

Our week is built around visualizing — and learning how those visualizations guide the choices you make on the page, offering an intentional framework for your drafting and revision. We'll work on visualizations together, practice using the tools as a group, and then apply them to your own work. 

This week-long workshop is an invitation to slow down — to reconsider the tools you bring to your work, to explore craft in the company of others doing the same, and to find the kind of writerly inspiration that only a coastal Maine in early fall can offer. You may leave with new drafts, revisions of work you've been carrying for a while, or both. The goal is to engage in process — to see how new tools shift your writing and the way you understand your work going forward. You will leave with a repeatable practice for seeing your writing more clearly, and making more intentional choices on the page.

A note on materials: much of our week will be spent visualizing our work — storyboarding scenes, mapping structure, plotting character on the page. For this, you'll keep an ongoing process book, the way visual artists do when they're testing ideas and making decisions about significant work. A full materials list will arrive with your registration confirmation. No artistic ability required. Messitt says, “My brother's stick figures work on professional film and television sets, so whatever you bring to the table is exactly what you need.”

Workshop Schedule:
Sunday Night: Welcome Meet and Greet at 6pm
Monday – Thursday: 9am – 4pm
Friday: 9am - 2pm
*Subject to change*