An exercise in breaking a single episode of a one-hour drama with active audience participation is called Breaking the Story. Tim Minear used a white board and marker to guide the class through the act breaks of an episode of the long-running WB hit television show, Angel. The best ideas are rewarded with a place of honor on the whiteboard, where the episode will take shape over the next two hours. Every pitch is carefully listened to by Minear, who explains why some ideas will never make it to the board. He steers the group through a process that many professional writers find difficult: creating a story from scratch that serves the characters, stays true to a theme, and how to survive getting an idea shot down in a room full of your peers with your ego in tact. Minear keeps the audience laughing with war stories from his own experiences in writers rooms, and follows the exercise with a Q&A session in which he explains how he wrote the spec that landed him a job on The X-Files along with his suggestions for writing a very dark I Love Lucy