BEFORE
YOU ENROLL

Yes — and it doesn't matter which genre. The method works on character architecture, not genre conventions. Whether you're writing literary fiction, thriller, romance, fantasy, science fiction, or historical fiction, the underlying problem is the same: your character has a wound, a compensation, a gap between what they say and what they do. The Socratic method surfaces that truth regardless of the world they inhabit.

The course includes specific briefing guidance for thriller, literary fiction, historical fiction, romance, and speculative fiction in the Training Your Coach resource — so your genre is addressed directly.

The method is fully applicable to both. Screenwriters often find it especially powerful — dialogue is everything in a screenplay, and the Socratic approach goes directly to what a character cannot say out loud, which is where subtext lives. Walter White and Don Draper appear throughout the course for a reason.

Short story writers work in compressed form, where every word carries more weight. Finding the substrate — the wound generating a character's behavior — matters even more in short fiction, because you don't have 300 pages to build to it gradually. The method delivers it efficiently.

Yes. Every assignment offers an alternative path for writers who don't have a current draft. You can work with a character you've been carrying in your head, a character from published fiction you know well, or a character you develop from scratch during the course.

In fact, some writers find it easier to begin without an existing draft — there's no fixed version to protect, which means you can go deeper into the excavation without second-guessing whether you're changing something that already works.

The course assumes you can write a sentence, not that you have years of craft training. The method doesn't build on existing craft knowledge — it supplements it. Many writers find that having less ingrained habit around character-building actually makes the Socratic approach easier to absorb, because there are fewer competing frameworks to set aside.

If you're early in your writing life and already asking why your characters feel thin, this course gives you a foundation most writers don't encounter until years in.

Most writing courses teach craft from the outside — rules, techniques, structure, showing vs. telling. This course starts from the inside. It's built on behavioral science, not craft doctrine: Carl Rogers' person-centered approach, the Socratic method, Alfred Adler's wound psychology. The instructor spent 35 years watching what actually changes people — and applied that to fiction.

If you've taken courses that gave you new information about writing, this one does something different. It surfaces what you already know about your characters but haven't been able to access.

It's a structured approach to excavating character truth using Socratic questioning — the same method Socrates used in the Athenian marketplace, where he refused the first answer and kept asking until something real surfaced.

Applied to writing, the method works like this: instead of asking AI to write your characters, you ask AI to question you about them. The AI becomes a Socratic coach — trained with specific setup language to ask, not answer — and through a series of questions, surfaces what you already know about your character but haven't been able to articulate.

The third or fourth answer is where the truth lives. The method is designed to get you there.

The substrate is the wound underneath a character's behavior — the specific fear or unresolved truth that generates everything they do, including what they say and what they can never quite say.

Alfred Adler's research showed that personality is built from compensation: a person experiences a wound, develops strategies to address or hide it, and over time those strategies become who they are. In fiction, when a character has no substrate, readers feel its absence before they can name it. The scene feels performed. The dialogue sounds correct but doesn't land.

It's both, and that's the point. The writers who produce characters readers cannot forget are not the writers who follow the craft rules most carefully. They are the writers who have found a way to access what they know about their characters at a deeper level.

The behavioral science in this course isn't for analyzing people. It's for understanding why certain questions reach deeper than others — and how to use that in a session at your own keyboard. You don't need to study psychology. You need to apply the method. The course teaches you exactly how.

The opposite. The entire premise of this course is that AI should not write your fiction. The course dedicates a full lecture (3.1) to showing exactly why AI-generated fiction is structurally hollow — and uses that explanation to make the case for a completely different role.

In this method, AI asks. You answer. The words on your page are yours. The characters are yours. AI's job is to hold the question open long enough for what you already know to surface. It's a coach, not a ghostwriter.

Any major AI — Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini — works with this method. You don't need a paid subscription, though the paid tiers of each tool produce better results. The course provides exact setup language you paste in at the start of every session, so the tool is immediately configured as a Socratic coach regardless of which platform you use.

If you use the free tier of Claude or ChatGPT, that's sufficient to complete every assignment in the course. A single excavation session costs fractions of a cent if you're using the API, and is effectively free at the consumer tier.

It will. This is a known failure mode and the course addresses it directly. The Excavation Field Guide (included with the course) provides exact recovery lines — single sentences you paste in that immediately return the AI to its coaching role without losing the context you've built.

After the first two or three sessions, you'll feel the moment AI is about to drift and redirect it before the content appears.

Your skepticism is correct, and this course will explain exactly why what you experienced happened. Research from Microsoft, Kenyon College, and multiple independent teams shows AI-generated fiction has a structural bias toward the generic — not because the models are bad, but because of how they're built.

The method in this course sidesteps that problem entirely by changing what you ask AI to do. The generic output comes from asking AI to write. When you ask AI to ask — and you supply the specific knowledge of your specific character — what surfaces is anything but generic. It could only come from you.

The course has eleven lectures across four sections, plus a bonus lecture. Each video is three to six minutes — Ted teaches a concept, not a lecture hall. Plan approximately one hour per lecture if you want to engage with the assignments, reflections, and resources properly.

Most of that hour isn't watching. It's you applying the ideas to your own work, running an excavation session, or writing a reflection. The watching is the smallest part. The doing is where the change happens.

Every lecture from Section 2 onward comes with resources written specifically for this course — material you won't find anywhere else. These include:

White papers on the behavioral science behind the method (Kelly, Rogers, Adler, Kaufman, Dijksterhuis — real research, written for writers). Assignments that bring each concept directly into your own writing. Reflections that help you internalize what you've learned before moving on.

You also receive the Training Your AI to Coach complete reference guide (a six-part permanent reference for every excavation session you'll ever run), the Excavation Field Guide (principles, failure modes, recovery lines, substrate signals), and the Hollow Dialogue Diagnostic (a one-page scan you can run on any scene in your current draft).

Yes. Direct access is included with enrollment — email and WhatsApp. If something isn't landing, Ted wants to know. He typically responds within 48 business hours.

This isn't a course-as-product with a support ticket system. Ted is a fellow traveler who built this tool because he needed it. If a lecture isn't making sense, if the method isn't working on your specific character, or if an assignment is producing surface answers you can't push through — reach out. That's what the access is for.

Six specific things. You'll be able to:

Write a line of dialogue and explain exactly why your character spoke that way — not because you decided it, but because you excavated it. Spot a hollow scene and repair it by finding what the character is protecting underneath. Write voices so distinct you can cover the attribution and know who spoke. Use AI as a Socratic coach that asks rather than writes. Find the substrate — the wound beneath the compensation — and write from that level in every scene. Apply a method you own permanently to every character you'll ever write.

The first real excavation session — running the Socratic method on a piece of your own dialogue — typically produces something in thirty to forty minutes that would have taken much longer to find any other way. The shift isn't gradual. It's a moment. The third or fourth answer arrives, and the character hands you something you didn't know you had.

What accumulates over the full course is the ability to do that reliably, for any character, in any scene, for the rest of your writing life. The first session gives you the proof. The full course gives you the ownership.

The course addresses this directly — it's the last excavation slide on the home page for a reason. The answer is: once you've run one real excavation and felt the difference between a constructed answer and a retrieved one, you can't unknow it.

The method isn't a trick or a technique that fades. It's a posture — the refusal to accept the first answer as the final one. That refusal, once practiced, becomes natural. The course's goal isn't to give you a new habit. It's to change how you see the problem.

Lifetime access. Once you enroll, all lectures, all resources, all assignments, and all updates are yours permanently. Return to any lecture on any novel you ever write. The Training Your Coach reference guide and the Excavation Field Guide are permanent tools — you'll use them on your current manuscript and every manuscript after it.

Full details are in the course policies page. In brief: if you engage with the course — watch the lectures, attempt the assignments — and find the method genuinely isn't working for you, reach out directly. Ted would rather solve the problem than refund the enrollment fee. But if the course isn't right for you, that conversation is available.

The course is hosted on systeme.io. After enrollment you'll receive an email with login credentials and immediate access to all sections. The platform works on desktop, tablet, and mobile — you can move through lectures in any order, though the course is designed to be taken sequentially as each section builds on the one before it.

Yes to both. Write Living Characters is a complete, standalone course — one enrollment, permanent access, no ongoing fees. It teaches the full Stratum Socratic Writing Method as applied to character depth and dialogue.

Future masterclasses are planned that take the method into other dimensions of writing — motivation, contradiction, silence, scene structure. Each will be a separate enrollment. Completing this course is the foundation for everything that follows.