WorkShops
We are excited to present a diverse array of workshops that cater to most authors’ needs and answer some of your burning questions about how to make your writing stronger. Unless otherwise specified, all of the following are for fiction and nonfiction writers.
Curriculum
Making Ancient Texts Your Own
Jeanne Blasberg
Narrative retellings are riding a cultural wave in which myths and legends are being recontextualized, bringing once-muted voices to the fore. Are you interested in making ancient plots your own? Whether from mythology, the Bible, or other foundational texts, ancient launching points evoke something recognizable and familiar in the reader, providing an established structure and opportunity for rich and unique interpretation. This workshop looks at several published works with an eye toward their varying degrees of “exactness.” What are the pros and cons of a light touch versus a heavier one? When should a writer take liberties? This session is useful both for writers of “retellings” and for those motivated to write narratives “in conversation” with great literature.
Your Story, Your Self: How to Shape Your Story from Your Deepest Self
April Bosshard
Stories arise from the hearts and minds of writers reaching across time and space to connect meaningfully with the hearts and minds of readers. Stories start with you. The phrase “know thyself” was one of the maxims inscribed into the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, Greece. It’s wise advice for writing too. Knowing who you are, and expanding that self-awareness, is an essential part of creating and designing deep stories. This workshop will guide you through several impactful exercises designed to uncover your core values and unearth invaluable and ongoing resources for developing stories that matter to yourself and to the world.
What’s Your Story Really About? A Writer’s Approach to Defining, Developing, and Discussing Theme
April Bosshard
A story is always about many things, but taken together the sum of its parts will make up a whole that conveys some kind of meaning. That meaning is generated by your story’s theme. Yet writers don’t approach theme as academics or critics might. Our calling is to create meaning—through story—and to do this we need to think about theme in particular ways. This workshop explores theme from a writer’s perspective, offering easy-to-apply tools to identify, develop, and discuss theme in your own writing. If you’ve ever struggled to articulate what’s your story’s really about, this workshop will empower you to answer it confidently for yourself and others.
Passion, Pride, and Pain: Three Keys to Unlocking the Magic of Your Main Character
April Bosshard
Characters’ attitudes and actions are shaped by three main forces: a worldview they feel passionate about, unresolved issues they are blind to, and past experiences that have left unhealed wounds or residues of arrested personal development. Stories provide the crucibles in which characters can face the conditions and consequences of their passions, pride, and pain. As characters attempt to transcend their limitations through healing, maturity, and growth, a powerful arc of authentic change emerges. This workshop offers you three interrelated keys of character development that ensure the kind of authentic, deep character growth that is core to creating compelling, memorable, and much talked about characters and stories.
The Intersection of Memoir + Fiction #1: Five Crossover Techniques That Bring Your Story to Life
Jeannine Ouellette
The best memoirs read like immersive novels. That’s because, in order to lift off from the page and soar, true stories must rely on the time-tested devices of well-crafted fiction. This workshop shows you how to use fictional techniques to break out of the “then this happened, then that happened” rut of memoir writing. We’ll cover inventive approaches to place, character, time, and dialogue—and we’ll tackle the everlasting conundrum of scene vs. summary with strategies for eking the very most out of both while avoiding the pitfalls.
The Intersection of Memoir + Fiction #2: The Crucial Role of Voice in Narration
Jeannine Ouellette
To narrate a memoir is to experience yourself as a trinity: you the author at your keyboard, you the “narrator” as a constructed persona, and you the character whose experience you’re attempting to portray. Commanding this threefold perspective is a superpower that can elevate your work and amplify its resonance and emotive capacities. This session will walk you through concrete approaches to scene writing when you are both a character in the original action and a constructed narrator with a more mature or nuanced perspective on the events, and a right-now writer who knows “everything” about the story you're telling.
The Intersection of Memoir + Fiction #3: Exteriority and Embodied Writing to Supercharge Your Prose
Jeannine Ouellette
Nothing, not one thing, can awaken and enliven our writing more than embodied writing. This simple but dedicated practice can change everything. Embodied writing offers a doorway to truth, yes, while also unlocking prose that evokes sensation and emotion for readers. Kafka said the purpose of art is to be the ax that breaks open the frozen sea inside us. Embodied writing delivers on that that promise in the very best fiction and can make a crucial difference in memoir. But fair warning: Embodying your writing is about more than just “adding some sensory detail.” This workshop shows you how.
The Art of Brevity
Grant Faulkner
In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what’s left out of a story is often more important than what’s included. In this workshop, Grant Faulkner, cofounder of 100 Word Story and author of The Art of Brevity, will discuss how a different type of creativity emerges within a hard compositional limit and will explore the many different forms that short shorts can take.
A Crash Course in Novel Writing
Grant Faulkner
One of the biggest obstacles any writer faces is writing the first draft of a novel. As Nora Ephron said, “I think the hardest part about writing is writing.” Your story matters, and "someday" is not the time to write it. If something has been holding you back from writing your novel—whether it be lack of time, lack of motivation, lack of knowing how to write it, or just plain fear—then Grant Faulkner, former Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, can help you get your creative juices flowing and take the first steps to planning your novel. Warning: You will leave this session with a novel plan in hand, so be prepared to write.
What It Takes to Finish a Book
Grant Faulkner
Writing a novel has been compared to months of pregnancy, running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or even going to war. And it can feel like all those things in one. This is why it’s worth thinking about the novels you’ve abandoned and ask if you gave up because the novel wasn’t good enough or because you lacked the stamina to see it through. Many a novelist has hit a wall and abandoned their creative dreams not because of a lack of talent, but because of their creative mindset. Your main task as a novelist is to train for endurance and develop the creative mindset necessary to be vulnerable, overcome imposter syndrome, release perfectionism, manage envy, develop grit, be accountable—and commit to finishing your novel!
Writing for Change
Elizabeth Hines
The world needs your voice! If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to craft a compelling narrative that can inspire real social change, this class is for you. Join us for a workshop that will explore the intersection of politics, activism, and storytelling, and set you up for success in crafting persuasive non-fiction narratives (long and short form) that drive societal transformation. Through hands-on writing exercises and analysis of influential titles, you’ll learn how to wield language as a tool for advocacy, shedding light on pressing issues and inspiring action among your readers.
The Art of Anthology
Elizabeth Hines & Brooke Warner
What does it take to put together a captivating anthology, and why do they matter anyway? Since the 16th Century, writers and readers alike have been taken with the idea of collecting a variety voices in one volume, to offer a range of perspectives on a common issue or topic. Curating and editing an anthology can offer a powerful means of drawing attention to a theme or issue that has cultural relevance — while building community among writers and attracting new readers, to boot. Join Liz Hines and Brooke Warner to learn the ins and outs of crafting anthologies that make a mark.
Meditation for Writers
Stuart Horwitz
In this session, you will learn an ancient yet simple meditation to center yourself before writing and combat the fear that can take over the first five to ten minutes of a writing session. Meditation can assist you in setting a reachable goal for the day’s session and bring consistency and continuity of approach to your material, regardless of what draft you are working on. As part of a personal ritual, meditation can sustain our writing for a lifetime. No previous experience or specialized equipment required!
Finish Your Book in Three Drafts: Crafting Fiction and Creative Nonfiction with the Book Architecture Method
Stuart Horwitz
It’s the age-old battle between the outliners and the pantsers—those who meticulously script every writing session, and those who pilot solely by feel. Finding your unique approach requires a method. The Book Architecture Method has helped many best-selling writers transform their messy manuscripts into polished books. Accomplished and aspiring writers alike will learn the secrets of how to painlessly create a complex narrative, such as what “plotting” actually means; how to make sure your book has only one “theme”; and how to separate your work into scenes and diagnose what’s going wrong with your manuscript. This workshop will also introduce you to a process for organization and gives you a new perspective on your book’s core, its structure, and where the work of revision lies most clearly.
Editing and Self-Editing
Stuart Horwitz
Writers are usually tasked with editing other people’s work at some point. We may not always have the editing skills we need when called upon in this capacity, however. This session will help you develop fifteen skill sets that you can apply to others’ work and your own. This workshop’s introduction covers adopting a mindset of neutrality, how editing is a conversation, and knowing how to respond based on what draft a writer is working on. Following is a set of specific tools, such as working with genre conventions, narrative arcs and plot holes, scenic writing, links and transitions, tone of voice, characters and relationships, point of view, and theme.
Plaracterization: The Kiss Between Plot and Character
Joshua Mohr
The best plots aren’t controlled by the author—they spring from the characters themselves. The more we realize that our characters are sovereign beings with independent consciousnesses, the better prepared we are to traverse plot and characterization. In this class, we’ll ponder characters’ decision-making, the causality between plot points, and how to keep a reader flipping pages. This strategy will help any aspiring writer dig deep into character and plot—to the core of the story.
The Art of Putting Words in People’s Mouths
Joshua Mohr
Conventional advice is always advocating that strong dialogue not only furthers characterization but also pushes the story’s plot forward. How’s this done? What are characters saying, and how does each spoken word help the reader form her own opinion about the character(s), their preoccupations, biases, passions, etc.? And how are characters communicating with one another? In what way(s) is information being conveyed, its mood and demeanor? Deep discussion of techniques and examples will inspire us to write, write, write. The only way you can learn how to construct solid dialogue is by practicing!
Five-Sense Psychology
Joshua Mohr
This seminar examines how setting might be a useful frame of reference for rendering a character’s inner life. To plumb the existential depths of our protagonists and establish a lasting connection with them, readers need to traverse the setting of the mind. This workshop will lead you through all five senses, teaching you how to translate these perceptions into opportunities to enhance your thought process on the page and infuse these techniques directly into your work in progress, building dynamic inner lives for your characters and places for your reader to curl up and listen to the whispers of the heart.
Bring Your Book to Life with Cinematic Flair
Annie Tucker
Picture your favorite scene in a movie you love. What makes it memorable? Is it the setting: a cozy kitchen, a cliff, a long pier? Is it the action: a mother teaching her daughter to make bread, a young boy leaping off a thirty-foot rock, a narrow getaway in a speedboat? Or is it the dialogue: the mother shares family secrets; the boy’s friends cheer him on while he shrieks at them; the boat driver tells the passenger where the money went? How can you tap into the dynamism of your favorite filmmakers to make your own writing more vivid and suspenseful? By thinking cinematically about literary scene development. This workshop identifies the essential elements of scene development in fiction and nonfiction, providing concrete examples from books and movies to help you understand how the two art forms complement each other. You’ll also do numerous in-class writing exercises to make you more comfortable with writing great scenes. Equipped with a new tool kit, you’ll discover that transforming an unremarkable moment into an unforgettable episode is one of the most fulfilling experiences an author can have.
Point of View: Who’s in Charge Here?
Annie Tucker
Anytime we begin to read a novel, we entrust the telling of the story to its narrator(s). Consistent use of these characters’ perspectives throughout the book is an essential component of a satisfying reading experience. Conversely, when a book slips out of its established point(s) of view, the effect can be tremendously disorienting for the reader. This workshop will help you to 1) identify all of the narrative points of view available to you; 2) select the point of view that best suits your story; 3) recognize and avoid “head jumping,” in which an unexpected narrator pops uninvited into a scene; and 4) learn how to effectively structure a novel that contains two or more points of view, as well as how many points of view are too many.
Memoir Mojo: Tips for Writing a Memoir That Sells
Brooke Warner
Memoir is a much-beloved genre these days, but it’s notably hard to sell to publishers, partly because too many memoirs fall into the trap of being about what happened, rather than the meaning that the memoirist infuses into life-changing events. In this workshop, Brooke Warner will cover three qualities of memoir that will help you impact your readers’ lives: 1) your story’s universal relevance or resonance; 2) storytelling (i.e., “showing”) and scene building; 3) writing a book that holds deep meaning for your reader. You’ll also learn what publishers are looking for in a memoir, common mistakes memoirists make when they’re starting out, how to write “in scene” and be a good guide for your reader, and how to think about “why it matters” over “what happened” as you tell your story.
