Barbara Schiffman

After working for over 35 years in Hollywood as a highly-regarded story analyst and script consultant for major agencies, film/TV studios and cable networks plus high profile and indie producers and directors, Barbara "retired" in 2019 to Flathead Valley, Montana, to live near her grandsons. Since the mid-1970s, she taught seminars about screenwriting at numerous conferences in Los Angeles and was a featured speaker about being a Hollywood reader at conferences and AFI writing classes.

In Montana, she's an active member of Authors of the Flathead and since 2016 has taught about adapting books to film and pitching your work at AofF writing conferences. She also provides mentoring and resources for Flathead Valley authors and budding screenwriters, and is the organizer of the Montana Screenwriting & Storycrafting Meetup, which meets monthly in person or on Zoom. Recently, she was invited to help inaugurate a new conference in Helena Montana for writers of all types: the Montana Writers Rodeo. She taught about what new writers need to clearly include in their screenplays to help pro Readers "get" their stories properly.

Her latest project is to encourage writers to share their work aloud. She co-taught a 2-month class at Flathead Valley College in Spring of 2023 ("Tell Us Your Story"), and now co-curates and co-hosts the new Flathead Story Concerts with her writer-husband Glenn. In these quarterly live events, pre-selected Tellers share their stories -- true experience essays (ala The Moth Radio Hour), flash fiction, book excerpts or poetry -- at venues around Flathead Valley.

As a member of the Bigfork (MT) Independent Film Festival's steering committee in 2019-2021, Barbara was inspired to create the first Montana Screenwriting Competition for the 2020 BIFF event. The screenwriting contest was designed to identify and honor 20 Montana-connected screenwriters plus screenplays by US and Canadian writers which highlight Montana locations. She helped produce a Table Read of one of the top 6 MTSC's finalist scripts which had to be filmed instead of presented live at BIFF 2020 due to COVID.

Via phone and Zoom, Barbara also coaches screenwriters and prose writers of all genres to craft and also share their scripts, books and blogs. She occasionally edits books for self-publishing authors of fiction, non-fiction and memoirs, and coaches writer-speakers for live spoken word events or pitching their scripts or books.

Her chapter on "Key Things to Know Before You Write" is featured in the popular screenwriting anthology "Now Write! Screenwriting: Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers" (published by Tercher/Penguin). She also contributed chapters to many personal growth anthologies and has self-published books on creativity and life balance based on her own coaching programs, including "The Akashic Muse," "Ready~Set~Next!" and "Living in Balance for Boomers" (available on Amazon).