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.
CRAFTING YOUR CHARACTER’S ARC: Navigating the Four Stages of Authentic Growth
April Bosshard
Writers know that characters are meant to grow and change in a story, but how and when does that happen? In this exercise-based workshop, writers will design their character’s “arc”—that personal journey of transformation that lends meaning to narrative. As writers explore their character’s outer desire and inner need within the context of beliefs and values, a four-stage map of growth that can guide their unfolding story will emerge.
What’s Your Story Really About? A Writer’s Approach to Defining, Developing & 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.
let go and let ai: Streamline Your Writing & Submission Process with a Personalized AI Coach
Candice Mays
Many writers excel at craft but struggle with business systems and process—tracking submissions, maintaining consistency, managing overwhelm, and making strategic decisions about their careers. This workshop teaches you to leverage AI for executive-function support and personalized problem solving, moving beyond general advice to create implementable solutions based on your specific constraints and challenges as an author.
Loaded Landscapes: Redefining landmarkS to unlock the stories everyday places hold
Candice Mays
Transform the places in your stories from simple backdrops into powerful narrative engines and mine their historical and social contexts for rich storytelling material. Through practical exercises and systematic techniques, this workshop will help you develop strategies for activating landmarks to create a layered context collapse of tension naturally emerging from the spaces your characters inhabit and the complex relationships they have with those places.
How to Get an Agent Faux Pas: What to Avoid Doing if You’re Trying to Get a Literary Agent
Felice Laverne
Whether you’re new to the query trenches or have experience with trying to secure agency representation, there are certain faux pas that authors of all levels of experience commit (yes, even those who’ve been repped before). We agents can spot them from a mile away—and when you have only a few seconds to catch a literary agent’s attention, those faux pas can be the difference between securing representation and remaining in the trenches. From query letters to sample pages, social media to the representation call itself, this workshop gets down and dirty about what not to do if you’re seeking literary representation.
Kill Your Darlings: How to Cut and Kill Characters, Subplots, and Book Ideas
Felice Laverne
Some of the most common things Felice Laverne sees as an agent, a celebrity ghostwriter, and a workshop facilitator are manuscripts that suffer under the weight of too many superfluous ideas. Not all ideas are created equal, and not every character deserves a place in your book. But how do we know which of our ideas are good ones and which ones we should toss by the wayside? How do we know when it’s time to kill off a character or cut one of our plot threads—especially those that we adore or are emotionally invested in and can’t bear to part with? This workshop is designed to answer those questions.
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 should you consider compiling a collection anyway? For any writer of a subject-driven book, an anthology can be both a great entry point into the industry and a way to build credibility and platform. Curating and editing an anthology is creatively fulfilling and a powerful way to draw attention to a theme or issue that might be central to your work. If you’re looking to build community and attract readers, an anthology can be an attractive project as either a supplemental or a standalone work. Join us to learn the ins and outs of crafting anthologies that leave 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.
Learn to Edit Yourself (and Others!)
Stuart Horwitz
As writers, we think about writing more than we do about editing. Whether you are working on a novel, a piece of short fiction, or creative or prescriptive nonfiction, editing is something “other people” do. But what about if you want to learn to edit yourself? Or if you are asked to help edit the work of others, whether as a sideline or as a beta reader in a trade-off of efforts? This session is designed to give you some of the training and confidence to know whether you are doing the right set of editing tasks in the right way. Topics include the editing mindset of helpfulness and neutrality; knowing what draft a work is in to determine how general vs. how specific your focus should be; macro editing topics to consider, from diction to order to narrative arcs; and examples of editing that show a conversation between editor and author (or, if you are editing yourself, between you and you!).
writing the things you think you cannot say
Stuart Horwitz
Writers of creative nonfiction, especially memoir, inevitably come upon material that they dare not write about: abuse, criminal behavior, or betrayal, to name just a few topics. How will people react should the work reach a larger audience? Do you name names, or disguise people . . . and won’t your audience still know? Shouldn’t you just wait until everyone is dead? This workshop will teach writers to handle delicate material so that they can find their way to an end that is satisfying, legal, and, most of all, helpful for readers who have suffered the same—as opposed to giving up before we even start.
Reflection and Takeaway: The Heart and Soul of Memoir
Brooke Warner
Memoir is more than just a story of what happened to you. Its heart and soul lies in two elements of craft that every memoirist needs to have a firm handle on: reflection and takeaway. Most beginning memoirists are so focused on the plot of their story that they forget that readers love memoir for what it says about the human condition, for its capacity to help us understand something about the world we live
in or about ourselves. Reflection requires you to stop your narrative and answer the question “What sense do I make of this part of my story?” Takeaway asks you write about your thoughts and impressions on your subject matter, to delve deeper into your experience and your message, and to be a wise voice for your reader. This session will show you exactly how to implement this kind of writing into your memoir, complete with examples from published works. You’ll leave knowing how to tap into the heart of your memoir and to connect with your reader on a whole new level.
Bring Your scenes 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.
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.
WHAT DO GHOSTWRITERS ACTUALLY DO?
Annie Tucker
Ghostwriting has never been more popular than it is today, but the profession remains a mystery to many people. What are its ethical implications? How does the process work? What are the most important ingredients for a productive author-ghostwriter relationship? How do egos factor in to the equation? And, most important, is ghostwriting a viable option for you to explore if you are not gaining the momentum you need as a writer or simply do not have time to craft your own story? This workshop answers all these questions and more.
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.
