Master the art of cinematic storytelling by applying screenwriting principles like "show, don't tell," tight pacing, and high-stakes dialogue to your prose. This session teaches you how to translate visual storyboarding into rich narrative descriptions, ensuring your story or novel moves with the momentum and clarity of a blockbuster script.
Bring your questions and inner-child to this workshop where we will explore what constitutes a middle grade novel. Topics include age range, word count, voice, and acceptable (and unacceptable) topics. A recommended middle grade ‘to read’ list will also be provided with specific books within several middle grade genres.
A scene can come out of inspiration or careful design. But what should you do when your words aren't working? Come learn the secret ingredients to crafting a compelling scene!
Is this your first writers conference? Classes with a ✅ in the title like this one are especially good for newcomers.
“Fix the pacing.” “Strengthen the character arc.” “Raise the tension.” Writers often receive revision feedback that identifies a problem without explaining how to practically solve it. In this class, we’ll break down how to transform broad editorial feedback into intentional revision passes that strengthen the momentum of your story rather than sending you into endless drafting loops. Learn how to evaluate your novel through the lens of setup, payoff, escalation, and genre expectation so that your plot points, character arcs, thematic throughlines, and craft choices build upon one another with purpose. We’ll discuss how to identify the structural pressure points of your manuscript, revise backward from major payoff moments, and use tools like the seven-point plot structure to create stories that feel cohesive, emotionally satisfying, and earned from beginning to end.
Batman and Joker. Mulder and Skully. C3P0 and R2D2. Elsa and Anna. Dive into archetypes, arcs, and foils to learn how to craft complex and complementary characters that enrich narratives and bring stories to life.
Time is constant in practice—though not in perception (to readers of fiction, or fictional characters!). This workshop shines light on exercises and techniques available to writers to advance, compress, divide and retreat seasons and seconds to your narrative advantage. Ultimately, using these strategies effectively rewards our readers, and makes them more likely to view time spent in our worlds as time well spent.
