Television Sky Presents Knife Fight Ballet, a Workshop from Emil Ottoman
Let the violence speak
THE FIRST WORKSHOP FROM EMIL OTTOMAN
KNIFE FIGHT BALLET: REGISTRATION IS OPEN
A 10 week workshop on the theory + craft + philosophy of violence in fiction—from brawls to firefights, psychological abuse, body horror, noir pressure-cookers, and everything else that lives under the umbrella of harm.
I’m running this once | One cohort: No reruns
We treat violence as a system of narrative physics:
tension → choice → impact → aftermath.
Not choreography. Not camera-blocking. Not “cool.” Not edge for being an edgelord.
This is a philosophy-heavy class. We’re going to talk about why violence exists on the page at all; what it reveals; what it costs; what it changes; what it makes a reader complicit in, and how it rewires/fractures/breaks/fixes/etc. the moral meaning of a story.
You’ll learn (among many other things) to write violent scenes as:
clean + readable without move-by-move choreography or camera brain bullshit
fast without leaning on the word “fast”, “then”, or dead metaphor/adverb stacks
brutal with purpose, no drifting into spectacle or gratuitous gore. If you want gore porno, watch Hostel.
WINNING THE GAME: You leave with one new or rebuilt scene and a targeted one-on-one consultation on the violence problem you can’t solve alone (or whatever the workshop drags into daylight).
Let the violence speak. Describe the decision, not the choreography.
Logistics (nobody get cute about it)
Starts: April 1
Runs: 10 weeks
Lives on: Wet.ink
Async: do the work on your own time; access material anytime
Seats
13 full workshop seats (5 flex pay seats)
2 scholarship seats (email: Emilottoman@gmail.com/Subject: SCHOLARSHIP/writing sample and why you? I encourage anyone to apply, skill level doesn’t matter)
27 audit seats (sequestered from the main cohort)
Cost
Full seat — $415 (≈ $41.50/week)
Includes: full material access, peer crit structure, and one 1:1 consultation with me.
Also: the first 13 full seats include a card / Television Sky New Years letter / page from a novella (previously sold for $15). Card holders will have the option to buy the novella later this year.
Audit — $187 (≈ $18.70/week)
Includes: full material access + a limited weekly Q&A thread led by me.
Audit does not include: peer crit, feedback from me, or the consultation. Self organize or play Lord of the Flies, it’s still worth it.
Suggested skill level
Novice to published. The only barrier to entry here is how many seats there are and you.
Hard line
No refunds. This runs once. The course/consult + feedback load is the point.
Application
There are 9 sections to fill out.
Apply below:
Who’s teaching this
Emil Ottoman is co-founder of Television Sky, an author, and line & developmental editor with twenty years in the trenches and over a decade of paid professional editorial work (often underground and more often than he’d want, under NDA). His practice is built on structure, sentence-level control, and the ruthless clarity of what a scene does to a reader. His fiction lives at the collision point between lyric intensity, overwhelm by design, and procedural precision, where violence isn’t choreography, it’s pressure, decision, rupture, consequence.
Knife Fight Ballet is the one-time distillation of that practice and HOW he approaches a story: theory-forward, craft applied, and designed to produce at least one finished or rebuilt scene that gives your reader a panic attack.
🔪🙆♀️‼️
Easy signup.