Teen Writers Institute 2025

Date & Time June 23-27, 9:30am-2:30pm General Information This course is designed for students entering 8th-12th grades. Please be sure to pack a healthy snack and lunch for writers. Students will have access to restaurants within the SJSU SU, but we likely will not know which eateries are open until the week of camp. NOVEL WRITING COURSE DESCRIPTION This course will cover everything you ever wanted to know about writing a book—and culminate with you writing one! We’ll tackle concepts, first lines, chapter structure, and everything else needed to craft exciting and meaningful worlds for our characters, including the minute details of world building that really make a story come to life. While writing, we’ll work on ways to keep up motivation, tackle writer’s block, and avoid creating another unfinished work. This course is designed as a precursor to our Novel Writing Program. At the end of the week students will have pages ready to apply for our year-round online program. Instructor Bio Hannah Jayne is the author of the UNDERWORLD DETECTION AGENCY CHRONICLES from Kensington books and the young adult thrillers TRULY, MADLY, DEADLY, SEE JANE RUN, THE DARE, and THE ESCAPE, available from Sourcebooks, Inc. When she’s not battling the demons of the Underworld or tackling a murderer at Hawthorne High, Jayne kicks her feet up in her San Francisco bay area home with her rock star husband, daughter, and their three enormous cats. The Writer's Room: Adventures in Screenwriting A Writer's Room is a space where screenwriters come together to break ideas, draft scripts, and refine their writing. For a week we will emulate a writer's room to learn the art of crafting scripts for shorts, television, and film. Together we will study scripts of our favorite shows, write scenes for spec scripts—fanfiction for screenwriters! and brainstorm ideas for our own original work. Students will have the option of writing collaboratively or alone. Our time together will culminate in a table read of scenes from our scripts. All levels of writers are welcome to join in the adventure of screenwriting! Instructor Bio Jane Gilmore is a teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose & Program Director for the San Jose Area Writing Project. She holds a Certificate in Novel Writing from Stanford University and her original television pilot, The Week's List, recently placed second in the screenwriting competition for the Sedona International Film Festival.