Time, Place, & Beyond: Bring Your Setting to Life – Cynthia Owens
I’ll show you how to plunge your reader into your setting and making it as real as your own backyard.
You’ll learn the basics of settings—time, place, and mood—and from there, you’ll discover how to research you story’s world.
The Emotional Arc – Tere Michaels
In this workshop, we’ll drill down into the different facets of your characters’ emotional arc and how it is both the spine (structure) and heart (feelings) of your story.
He Said, She Said: Defining Your Characters with Dialogue – Cynthia Owens
If you’re like most writers, you’ve probably taken a number of classes and read even more about writing snappy dialogue. That’s not this class. This class will focus on using dialogue to define your fictionals.
Your Can’t Copyright Tropes but You Can Make Them Your Own – Tere Michaels
First, we need to work out why certain tropes attract readers and what their expectations are. Then this workshop will discuss subverting tropes and reinventing approaches, without losing emotional buy-in from the reader.
Hero’s Journey for Lovers – Tere Michaels
In this workshop, we’ll talk about the structure of the romantic journey (based on the Hero’s Journey framework) and how it is the bones of a solid relationship story.
What Fan Fiction Gets Right (and What We Can Learn from It – Tere Michaels
We will take a journey through the differences between fan fic and “published” works, the differences between tropes here and tropes there, and also what the secret ingredient is that can make your writing pop directly into the hearts and minds of readers.
Take Your Characters From Flat to Fabulous: Creating Characters Your Readers Will Love – Cynthia Owens
We will cover:
The basics—vital statistics, names, age, voice, and the character interview.
The Place They Call Home—the space and how to define what it means to the character,
This is the Moment – Backstory—Using the 5 Ws—Who, What, Where, When and Why—of an incident or incidents that most significantly affected the character.
Who’s Talking Now? Dialogue—how dialogue and dialect can define a character.
Body Language—how your character’s body can show what he’s feeling, and what he might want to hide.
But Why Do They Do It?—how idiosyncrasies and odd habits shape your characters.
Clothes Make the Man—or Woman!—How a person’s dress reveals who they are.
Action and Reaction—How a character’s actions and others’ reactions to them reveal character.
What Matters Most?—How the things your characters care about the most can shape them.
The Supporting Cast – Secondary Characters
Those Who Forget History: Using Backstory to Enhance Your Novel – Cynthia Owens
We will cover:
What is Backstory?
Flashbacks and How to Use Them,
The Five Ws of Backstory—Who, What, Where, When and Why—of a character’s past.
Prologues—how to use a prologue to provide backstory.
Dialogue—how to manipulate your readers by using a character’s dialogue to hint at backstory.
Weaving—how to weave backstory into your story.
Inner Thought—revealing your character’s backstory through inner thought.
What Do They Want?—how your character’s backstory can affect his goals.
The New Way to Plot: Using backstory to plot your novel
Vanquishing Your Villain Conquering Writer’s Block – Cynthia Owens
In Vanquishing Your Villains, we’ll examine some of the problems that cause writer’s block and look at some possible solutions that will get you back into your chair with ideas flowing and fingers flying.
Writing Your ID – Tere Michaels
Our Ids are all about instant gratification! It’s very specific and primal, and we want what we want…now.
So what does that have to do with being a writer?