Using Small Conflicts To Move a Story Along
August 18, 2021 by marianne h donley in category Ages 2 Perfection Online Class, Online Classes tagged as Aged to Perfection Online Class, Mary Marvella, pantsers, plotters, Sagging Middles
Presented by: Mary Marvella
Date: September 1 – 30, 2021
Pricing: A2P Member fee: $15
Non-A2P Member fee: $30
About the Workshop:
“Using Small Conflicts To Move a Story Along” will involve ways to cure sagging middles in any story.
Writers who don’t plot can find themselves painted into a corner or wondering what to do next. Even plotters sometimes find a story seems to be going nowhere. Sometimes the problems are solved, but the book needs to be longer. OOPS!
So what can we do about that? Students and I will share ways to make scenes more meaningful and give characters problems that fit the situation and make those characters stronger for the new problems.
I will give lessons/lectures about why stories need conflicts, small and large, internal and external, to keep excitement going and readers reading.
Students will select slow scenes from their projects or create them so we can pump life into them with small or large rocks. I will give examples of problems based on the stories. We will brainstorm and share scenes on the loop each week.
About the Presenter:
Mary Marvella has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. The arrival of the book mobile was as exciting as hearing the music of the ice cream truck. As a child of the South, she inherited the storytelling gene from her parents and her grandmamas.
Retired from teaching classic works of the masters, Mary plays let’s pretend with her characters. She has published 10 novels, 1 book on editing, and a collection of Christmas stories.
Mary tutors, and coaches writers when she isn’t working on projects as a freelance editor. She has always been a grammar geek who loved soaking up new knowledge and reading everything, including labels on cereal boxes.
1 0 Read moreFreedom and Framework: Story Planning for Pantsers
February 18, 2021 by marianne h donley in category Online Classes tagged as A2PSRWA, Aged to Perfection, Catherine Chant, Online Class, Online Classes, pantsers
Presented by: Catherine Chant
Date: March 1 – 31, 2021
Pricing: A2P Member fee: $15
Non-A2P Member fee: $30
About the Workshop:
Flying by the seat of your pants to write the first draft for your book feels so freeing. It’s a time to play, to experiment, to try out new ideas. What fun!
But diving into a project as big as a novel without any plan at all often means a lot of extra work after the draft is completed as you scramble to revise hundreds of pages that might have no cohesion, inconsistent characters, or a wandering plot.
One way to lessen that extra work is to go into the rough draft phase of your book with a better idea of where the story’s headed. That doesn’t mean knowing everything about your story (how boring would that be?), but it does mean knowing something to give your story direction. “Outline” is a scary word for most pantsers. It sounds restrictive, it sounds tedious, it sounds boring. So, there will be no “outlines” here. Nope. None. Instead, you’re going to build yourself a “framework” for your story that’s open and flexible, with plenty of room for playing, experimenting, and checking out new ideas off the beaten path whenever the inspiration strikes you.
Story Planning for Pantsers: Keep your freedom, but keep on track, too.
About the Presenter:
Award-winning author Catherine Chant is a Romance Writers of America (RWA) Golden Heart® finalist. She writes rock ‘n’ roll romantic fiction and stories with paranormal twists for young adults as well as books on creative writing topics.
Catherine worked for 15 years as an IT computing & communication consultant at her alma mater Boston College before becoming a full-time writer. She teaches several online workshops for writers throughout the year and provides instructional articles on computing, gaming and crafts to different websites.
You can find out more about Catherine at her website.
Breaking Things Down Into Threes
June 26, 2011 by Marianne H. Donley in category Archives tagged as Beth Daniels, Online Class, pantsers, plotters, Plotting
With Beth Daniels aka Beth Henderson, J.B. Dane
About the Class:
Plots require organization – even those written by Pantsers. Why? Because all storytelling requires a flow, a smooth transition from one scene to the next. Getting it doesn’t require an outline though. All it requires is a system. A system of breaking everything down into thirds.
Three is a magic number. It’s used in art, music, interior design, and in literature. After all, doesn’t every story have a Beginning, a Middle, and an End? Three things.
But we need to go further. Need to section the various elements of our storylines into smaller and smaller divisions of three. Many have already have done this in writing essays at school, or in a public speaking class. Opening either a essay or a speech by telling the audience
- here’s what has occurred before and what we need to change,
- here is how we can change it or why we should change it, and
- the problem is this because of this and that and we need to do this to correct it.
Storylines in fiction do exactly the same thing, they simply use characterization, action and reaction to move along. Scenes can be broken down into threes; chapters can; POVs can. And in thinking by threes to create each tale, each element of a tale, story flow results.
Participants should have a work in progress, but it can be in any state of development – thinking about, early chapters, middle, or heading toward the conclusion. Thinking by threes works at any level, including editing. It can also help identify things that aren’t really needed in the book, the sort of things editors delete.
This class is for writers at any point in their writing career from unpublished to midlist.
About the Instructor:
Beth Daniels currently writes as Beth Henderson and J.B. Dane, though she answered to Lisa Dane and Beth Cruise in the past as well. She has worked with editors at Berkley, Zebra, Leisure, Harlequin/Silhouette, and Simon and Schuster’s Aladdin Paperbacks, done e-books for a now defunct company (not her fault, she says), and began her writing life with hardcover books slated for library use with a publisher that got out of the romance business (again, not her fault). More recently she’s had a number of articles about writing picked up by e-zines, saw a short story published in a mystery and suspense magazine that turned up its toes the next year (really, really not her fault), and has a story in the MOTHER GOOSE IS DEAD anthology slated for publication by Dragon Moon Press in 2011.
For over a dozen years Beth taught college level composition, both in the classroom and online, and a credit course on Novel Writing. Twenty-six of Beth’s manuscripts have appeared in print or e-book format, and in 12 different languages in over 20 countries. At the moment she is working on various manuscripts, some fiction, some non-fiction but related to writing.
She is a member of Romance Writers of America, and an active member and volunteer with the Kiss of Death Online romantic suspense chapter, and a fixture at SavvyAuthors.com.
Website: www.RomanceAndMystery.com
Breaking Things Down into Threes with Beth Daniels aka Beth Henderson, J.B. Dane
Date: July 11 – August 6, 2011 this is a four week class
Cost: $20 for OCC members, $30 for non-OCC members
Enrollment Information: http://www.occrwa.org/onlineclassJuly11.html
Enrollment Deadline: July 9, 2011
If you have specific questions, email occrwaonlineclass@yahoo.com
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Upcoming classes:
August 15 – August 28, 2011
Writing from the Male Point of View to Create Stronger Heroes with Sascha Illyvich
September 12 – October 8, 2011
Show and Tell: An Interactive Workshop with Shannon Donnelly
Check out our full list of workshops. http://www.occrwa.org/onlineclasses.html
Want to be notified personally two weeks before each class? Be sure you’re
signed up for our Online Class Notices Yahoo Group! Sign up at the bottom of http://www.occrwa.org/onlineclasses.html or send a blank email to OCCRWAOnlineClassNotices-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
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