Turbocharge Your Craft with New Writing Workshops from CI Manager Anna Siri

Many of you will have at some point exchanged emails with her–CI’s Manager Anna Siri. Anna is also an accomplished writer and mentor with many years of development and running contests under her belt. Now her Girl in Trouble Stories Substack is hosting a few new and exciting writing workshops, the first of which focuses on the romantic comedy. We talked to Anna about this new venture and what participants can expect. 

Tell us about Girl in Trouble Stories. What is it? How did it come about?

Girl in Trouble Stories started out as an eZine dedicated to short fiction, and it came together during the writers’ strike of 2023, when the four of us – Kacie Tergesen, Janis Robertson, Natalija Vekic, and I – were casting around for something creative to do that didn’t necessarily involve 12pt. Courier. We’re all screenwriters by trade, but it felt like an interesting challenge to build a space for storytelling in different forms that wasn’t going to be limited by Hollywood gatekeepers. Now in our second year, we’re broadening our horizons and starting to incorporate our roots again.

This summer, we ran a quasi-writers’ room to put together Little Finch, a noir in three parts that will run until September, and we have plans to expand into a “literary studio” that incorporates interviews, podcasts, animation, and independent filmmaking, as well as classes and workshops to share our experience, while still keeping up our fresh short stories every month and semi-annual live readings.

The name Girl in Trouble Stories touches on the idea that the definition of “Girl” can be a lot of different things, and that girls in conflict are really the basis of so much storytelling – something you find in everything from Helen of Troy to Norma Desmond to Wednesday Addams.

Your first writing workshop centers on rom-coms. What is the state of this genre right now?

Rom-Coms are in such an interesting place right now. We’re long past the major  rom-com resurgence of the ‘90s/’00s when Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan reigned supreme, and the style hearkened back to the screwball comedies of the Golden Age of Hollywood (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday). We rarely expect a rom-com to be an immediate theatrical box office hit anymore, though there are exceptions. The Shakespearean adaptation Anyone But You was a huge hit a couple of years ago, and The Materialists (a Rom-Com frame with a very indie auteur vibe) making waves this summer is a nice surprise.

Instead, romantic comedies have dominated the streamer landscape, thanks in no small part to the current overwhelming desire for escapism and Christmas movies. Everyone seems to want a  rom-com, but while they’re still making it to the big screen at times, theatrical-anything is a challenge, taken over by IP-based tentpoles and sequels.

With that, rom-coms are in a place where they can actually take a few risks and try new things. It’s a tough balance, and one that we’ll talk about in our workshop – writing something that satisfies the delightfully rabid fanbase that knows what they want from this genre, from meet-cute to HEA, and still finding a way to be fresh and innovative on the page. I just watched the trailer for A24’s upcoming Eternity, which (no spoilers) does exactly that. We’re also seeing more adaptations from the romance world, which has long been ignored as a source of material (unless you’re writing a Jane Austen movie, of course). Bridgerton and Outlander, naturally, but lately The Summer I Turned Pretty and My Oxford Year.

How has it changed over the years? What are the typical mistakes writers tend to make when writing rom-coms?

Rom-coms are fantastic because they’re constantly evolving, but perennial. The history of the rom-com is in many ways the history of women in the last century. Early examples emphasized the idea that marriage and family is the reward, and then by the ’80s and ‘90s, the tone had shifted to account for more career-minded women, and we got movies where the female protagonist’s arc wasn’t only wrapped up in winning the guy (Working Girl, You’ve Got Mail, Romancing the Stone). The new millennium has seen welcome diversity and new voices in everything from Love & Basketball to Crazy Rich Asians to Red, White, and Royal Blue, along with genre hybrids that allow for different perspectives, e.g., Warm Bodies, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and so on.

It’s a deceptively easy genre – Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back. How hard could it be? What a lot of writers forget is that first and foremost, there has to be romance – chemistry, hope, longing, desire, connection. At the same time, it can’t be only that. A character who only wants these things is inevitably going to learn that there’s more to life, for instance.

Secondly, writers sometimes forget the comedy. The saying goes – “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”  There’s a natural absurdity to life, and the way an audience connects is through that absurdity. Relationships are inherently ridiculous in the best possible way – getting into them, staying in them, getting out of them – and the more awkward, cringy, and tragically funny the writer can make the situation, the more the audience is going to relate. We usually want the core couple to make it, but we want the writer to tie us into knots before they do.

You also have a “Get Your Writing Done” workshop coming up. Is that a problem many writers face?

You can fight us on this, but we really feel that all storytelling is storytelling, and we created the “Get Your Writing Done” workshops to fit screenplays, novels, or whatever form your story takes. The Girl in Trouble crew has decades of experience to draw from, and with writers needing to understand how projects cross over (a short story becomes a novel becomes a screenplay becomes a musical becomes a game), it made sense not to limit the projects brought into our sessions.

Just getting the work done is probably the single most difficult thing to do, whether it’s a first draft or the twelfth round of edits, and the complaint I hear most often. Life intrudes, of course, and our inner self-doubt and procrastination demons like to batter us on a regular basis. A safe class space that offers a chance for feedback, brainstorming, accountability, and writing exercises to give you the structure and direction you need to finish that next pass, whether it’s the first draft or the final polish, can make all the difference.

Thanks for doing this. Any parting thoughts for our readers?

If you don’t want to spend your life thinking about crushes, seductions, breaking hearts, and groveling to make it right, writing rom-coms probably isn’t for you. It’s too hard to do if you don’t love the genre.

If that’s your wheelhouse, however, the homework I would assign is to watch or re-watch all the movies/shows listed above and make a list – what do each of the protagonists in these movies want, as opposed to what they really need at heart, and how is the love interest the answer to those questions — for good or evil? This is the foundation of the genre that you’re going to build on to help us all fall in love for an hour and a half.

Join us for our rom-com workshop and/or sign up for four weeks of guided writing sessions.

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