Friday | Rocklin Workshop - What am I doing here?: Why Asking 3 Essential Questions of Each Scene Can Drive Your Process

(fiction, narrative non-fiction)

In this workshop, we’ll start by examining the anatomy of a scene through several published examples. We will look at elements like character, setting, conflict, dialogue, and arc within these scenes. Next, we will consider three essential questions to ask of your own scenes within your manuscript in order to amplify these elements. It will be helpful if participants bring one or two scenes from their own work-in-progress to the workshop for practice, but it is not necessary in order to take the workshop.

Saturday | Grass Valley Workshop - Do the Math: How to Keep Pressing Forward When We Feel Stuck

(fiction, narrative non-fiction)

I get it. Sometimes, we just don’t feel like writing. We aren’t making any progress. The book seems like it’s going nowhere. The blank page is taunting us. The rewrite feels stale. In this workshop, I will take you through five exercises that have helped me when I’m feeling stuck on a manuscript, whether I’m in the first draft or fifth draft of the process. I call this “doing the math” because sometimes you just have to keep adding and subtracting or using “guess and check” until something seems to be working. These exercises will allow you to focus on certain elements of your manuscript like character, POV, conflict, and setting as well as provide a final exercise to get you thinking about the big picture of your manuscript.