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
There’s More to Selling Books than Amazon – Susan Palmquist
Why compete in a saturated market?
In this class we’ll look at alternative ways to sell your work, everything from lesser-known bookselling sites to setting up your own bookstore.
Getting Media Coverage 2-Week Intensive Workshop – Susan Palmquist
In this class you’ll learn what podcasts, blogs, and other print and online publications look for when they go hunting for a story.
You’ll also learn how to approach them for best results.
The Basics of Marketing & Promotion 2-Week Intensive Workshop – Susan Palmquist
In this two-week class, we’ll go through the nitty gritty of promotion and marketing and by the end you should be able to successfully handle your own book marketing.