I offer both standard workshops through discussion-board venues such as SavvyAuthors as well as personalized workshops and author coaching. For the latter, please contact me with your interests, and we'll see how we can best get you on track.
It's Midnight at SavvyAuthors in 2024!
(For those who have taken my workshops before, my workshops this year will have new content and focus. The co-authored workshops with Ivy Quinn will be similar to their prior incarnations, but you can take them here if you missed them last time. Further, if you've taken a class with me before and would like to keep developing that project, you can either take this class and ask more specific questions, or elect to sign up for a coaching package.)
Creating Your Wildest Romantasy 04/29/24 - 05/27/24
Now that romantic fantasy has gotten its own portmanteau, there are more opportunities for you to get your stories in front of the hungry romantasy reading public. For both the dedicated fantasy enthusiast as well as those just dipping their toes into the genre, making sure you've built out the wonder of the fantasy side of your romance is important to creating a story that not only serves the love story of your characters but leaves your reader satisfied.
In this workshop, we will start with your characters and build the world outward. We will question what world would've created characters like yours and how the world would in turn shape your characters. We will speculate what your characters' habits and behaviors imply about the world. Finally, we will address how a deeper understanding of the world's dynamics should help create the obstacles and tensions that hinder or drive your characters.
Sign up before April 22nd for $5 off!
The End of the World and the Beginning of Your Dystopian Novel 07/1/24 - 7/29/24
After the success of The Hunger Games, publishers and moviemakers were eager to recreate the success with other YA dystopias. However, none had the same kind of cultural impact. This workshop will tackle the issue of writing in dystopian fiction while trying to make your critical take stand out.
In this workshop, we will discuss some of the history of utopia and dystopia, dissect the most critical components of writing a dystopia, and rigorously evaluate how the elements of your dystopia are working towards the important social or political critique that you've intended to highlight in the story alongside your characters' individual arcs.
Sign up before June 24th for $5 off!
Monster as Metaphor: Strengthening the Impact of Your Paranormal Fiction 11/11/24 - TBD
Are your fairies just vampire-light? Are your werewolves less monstrous than badly behaved bros? Step up your Paranormal fiction game by attending to the historical resonances of monsters in the popular imagination. From Frankenstein to your average bloodsucker, monsters exist in literature as a mirror to our fears and a reflection of our inherent power imbalances. With some extra thought, your fiction can have an added layer of richness without having to hammer the message home, hidden in dialogue-based lectures.
In this course, we will use a few common monsters to talk about tropes as well as the literary understanding of how the monsters have been used thematically. We will explore theoretical understanding of monsters through concepts such as the Other and abjection. Finally, through exercises, we will develop your monsters, whether they are a common historical type or a breed of your own, to help you use the fears surrounding them to play up tensions and/or implicit messages about your world or what your characters are going through.
With Ivy Quinn
When Two Authors Are Better Than One 05/27/24-07/01/24
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Stephen King and Peter Straub, Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith— Although writing is often a solitary exercise, bringing the strengths of two writers together can be extremely rewarding in a number of ways: You can have a partner in crime, you can highlight your strengths and hide your weaknesses, and you can increase your readership.
In this workshop, we will cover the basics of collaborating, from initial conception through drafting and editing. Learning to use your co-writer as a source of ideas, as well as learning to settle differences of opinion regarding story direction, will be key to your successful novel. Finally, while this workshop will primarily be geared towards structuring and planning the co-writing process, there will be some tips along the way for pantsing-style writers for those who need a more spontaneous approach but want to avoid writing your partner into a corner.
Home for the Holidays: Writing a Holiday-Based Project- August-September- TBD
We all love the holidays—a time to eat, celebrate traditions, and be with family. Ratings, though, tell us that these universal experiences can also be good for business. Just look at the ratings dominance of channels like Lifetime or the popularity of Netflix’s Christmas films. And the benefits of holiday-set fiction extend even further. As a writer, you can draw in new audiences by using holiday pieces as marketing funnels. This course will examine a variety of factors related to holiday writing and how to utilize it as a crucial marketing opportunity.
To begin, we’ll discuss what marketing funnels are and how novellas or novels set around holidays can up your reader base. On the level of content and research, we’ll examine popular holidays to explore throughout the year, like Valentine’s Day and Halloween. Of course, we’ll also cover the winter holiday season with Hanukkah and Christmas and how to research holiday traditions outside of your cultural experience respectfully. Finally, in a larger context of integrating an engaging plot, we’ll dish on our favorite holiday tropes and archetypes.
Come get in the holiday spirit with us!
Older General Catalog:
How to World-Build through Your Characters
Together, we can create worlds that your readers won’t ever want to leave.
Syllabus: This is a four week course that will meet twice per week with discussion and exercises. We will cover the following topics:- The difference between elements within and without your world
- Using causal ripples to move between character creation and world-building
- Critical questions for creating belief systems and intergroup conflict
- World-building within contemporary settings
- Layering details about your world into your manuscript
Hearing Voices 101: Creating Distinct Characters
Have you gotten feedback that all of your characters sound the same, or that your characters aren’t distinct? There’s hope!
In this workshop, we split the rendering of character into two parts: Development of character and dialogue/description. First, to craft your characters, you must explore your character as a fully-realized person, and then, you have to put that person down on the page for the readers to experience.
Through discussion and exercises, we will cover how to layer in distinct details in your characters’ personalities and depict those details in character voice and action. Furthermore, we will discuss how to pace dialogue and use conflict to help better distinguish character traits. In the end, you should hear your characters more clearly in your mind as you write them onto the page in dialogue and point of view, allowing your readers to hear them, as well.
Syllabus: This is a four week course that will meet twice per week with discussion and exercises. We will cover the following topics:
- What is character voice?
- The difference between and purposes of various types of dialogue.
- How to layer distinct details into character personality
- How to depict detail through voice and action
- How to pace and cue dialogue
- How to use conflict to better distinguish character traits
In this class, we will break down some of these tropes and discuss various strategies for spinning your own versions of these yarns and making them golden. Furthermore, throughout the class, we look at case studies of books and occasionally visual media that employ different methods for adapting older stories into an engaging tale that will draw in readers and keep them wanting more.
Syllabus: This is a four week course that will meet roughly twice per week with discussion and exercises. We will cover the following topics:
- How often-retold stories come to “feel true”
- Ways of working with or against “narrative fidelity” in a familiar story: Reinvention, Recreation, Subversion, and Kitchen-Sink
- Making use of emotional resonances within stories from affect saturated symbols and objects
- Familiarizing yourself with major tropes used in fairytales
- Creating a coherent in-narrative world for your adaptation
- Planning your adaptation through structure, theme, and reference
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