Mike Bierman’s asynchronous method flips conventional wisdom and it actually works
The BAM Method: A 45-Time Award Winner Breaks the Rules of Screenwriting
Mike Bierman is not the kind of screenwriter you encounter in most industry conversations. He did not come through a film school. He does not have an MFA in Screenwriting. He is a licensed attorney who stumbled into the craft by reading audition scripts sent to his daughter, actress Erica Bierman, and deciding he could do better. That instinct proved correct. He has since won 45 awards for his screenwriting, co-written features with best-selling authors, and developed a method of approaching the blank page that established professionals have called revelatory.
The BAM Method Explained
Bierman calls his approach the Bierman Asynchronous Method, shortened to BAM. The central principle is disarmingly simple: do not write a screenplay from beginning to end. Write it from the outside in. The very first thing Bierman typically writes is the ending. He drafts the final scene before any other, establishing a destination before he has mapped a single road. Then he writes the opening scene. With both anchors in place, he writes whichever scene occurs to him as the most clearly defined, placing it in the screenplay as a floating island connected to neither anchor yet. He continues this process, gradually connecting islands until the gaps between them close and the script is complete.
“If you know the end, you know where you’re going,” Bierman explained in a podcast conversation on Indie Film Hustle. “So by definition, every single scene you write is going to develop character, advance the plot, or both. If a scene does neither, you throw it out.” This structural clarity, he argues, is what prevents the drift and accumulation of dead weight that plagues writers who march from page one forward into uncertainty. The screenplay that is written forward without a known destination tends to accumulate scenes that the writer likes but the story does not need, and cutting those scenes after the fact is the most painful kind of revision.
Why It Stops Writer’s Block
The traditional model of writing from page one creates a specific vulnerability: every decision opens onto an enormous field of subsequent possibilities, and the weight of those possibilities can become paralyzing. Bierman describes this not as a failure of creativity but as a rational response to structural uncertainty. If you do not know where you are going, every step forward is genuinely risky. The BAM method removes that risk by defining the destination at the outset. With a known ending, the question shifts from “what happens next?” to “how does this scene serve the journey toward what I already know must happen?” That is a profoundly more manageable question, and the difference between the two is the difference between paralysis and momentum.
Multiple professional writers with 18 to 20 produced films to their credit have tried the method after encountering Bierman’s description of it and reported that it transformed their process. David Silverman, creator of “The Wild Thornberries,” publicly endorsed the method and described it as generating unexpectedly fresh and twisty plot developments. The reason, Bierman suggests, is that writing out of sequence allows the writer to discover connections and juxtapositions that would never have emerged from a linear march through the material.
Rules Worth Breaking and Rules Worth Keeping
One of the most valuable aspects of Bierman’s philosophy is his nuanced relationship with screenwriting conventions. He does not dismiss the established rules. He insists that writers must know them thoroughly before choosing to break them. The decision to violate a formatting standard or structural convention must come from mastery, not ignorance. “Every rule is made to be broken,” he has written, “but you need to learn the rules and get good enough to decide when you need to break them.”
He is particularly critical of the tendency among novice writers to mistake knowledge about screenwriting for the ability to screenwrite. His Facebook group, Screenwriters Who Can Actually Write, was created explicitly as a counterweight to communities where writers discuss craft theory endlessly without producing work. His upcoming book, “Secrets of Screenwriting: Collected Essays,” extends this philosophy into long-form essay territory, compiled from years of detailed posts that attracted professional attention and engagement within the group. The Writers Guild of America remains the standard-bearing institution for professional screenwriting practice, and Bierman’s work sits in productive dialogue with its traditions.
The Contained Screenplay and Commercial Reality
Bierman is also a thoughtful advocate for the contained screenplay, a script that unfolds in a single location or a severely limited number of settings. His thriller “Needles” takes place almost entirely in a desert saloon that may or may not be purgatory. His script “The Grocer” is set entirely in a grocery store and its parking lot. Both have won awards and attracted professional interest. The commercial case for contained scripts is straightforward: they cost less to produce, they carry lower financial risk, and they are therefore more likely to actually get made. For unproduced writers working to break into the industry, the contained concept is one of the most powerful tools available.
Character development, Bierman argues, actually deepens when a writer is forced to work within a single location. The absence of external spectacle demands greater psychological complexity from the people on the page. This is the lesson of stage drama from ancient Greece through Arthur Miller, and it applies with equal force to the spec screenplay market today. Resources like Bulletproof Screenwriting explore these production realities in depth for writers who want to understand the business context behind craft decisions. The bottom line from Bierman’s career is the same as the lesson from the great contained films: constraint is not the enemy of creativity. It is frequently its most productive condition.