Beyond show-don’t-tell, create powerful scenes through details, images, and juxtaposition.

For Fiction Writers, Memoirists, and Essayists

Our strongest writing makes the reader feel with our characters/our narrator selves. But too often, we over-write—spelling out emotions, explaining through dialogue, interrupting memoir scenes with reflection or novel scenes with backstory—so that readers are watching someone else have an experience. By paring down our prose to singular details and powerful images, we give room for the reader to “lean in” to the story, actively assemble information, and share the discoveries, realizations, tears, and laughter on the page.

In this interactive webinar (let’s call it a workshop!) we’ll prune text, remove summaries to let details stand, and use gestures and images to create meaning and feeling. We’ll examine how to “score” text by arranging it on the page, making the visual processing of words and white space part of the reader’s experience. In published examples from fiction and memoir, we’ll learn how juxtaposition, high-context dialogue, and purposeful repetition give emotional punch. And we’ll challenge ourselves to create endings without explanations that resonate in the reader’s mind long after they’ve closed the book.

Raise your craft level and gain a tool kit. In-class writing time and live editing will give you a chance to apply this to your writing right away.

Can’t make it live? No worries—a replay will be available to all registrants.

This is a TWO-HOUR class, with 20 minutes of writing time in the middle. 

• 45 minutes – Learn a new tool kit of writing techniques to give fewer words more power.
• 5 minutes – Q&A to fully understand and apply the techniques.
• 20 minutes – Revise a scene from your novel, memoir, short story, or essay using your new tools. Allison will continue taking questions in the chat. 
• OPTIONAL: Volunteer for live editing and upload your revised scene as a Word doc or docx to a Google Drive (link will be provided IN CLASS; no pages accepted early).
• 40 minutes – Allison will live-edit volunteer pages on screen, noting where the writer is succeeding and what revisions could make the prose even more effective. She’ll call out specific techniques and tips for everyone to apply to their own work. 
• 10 minutes – additional Q&A and more on applying this work to your writing.

In this workshop you will:

• HEAR how the interplay of said and unsaid makes dialogue more powerful
• SEE how scoring text on the page establishes distance and attitude, smooths transitions, and increases dramatic tension
• DISCOVER ways to increase emotional power on the page through specific details
• APPLY the tools and techniques to your own scene, essay or story
• CREATE powerful emotional connection with deliberate craft choices

This Course is ideal for writers who are …

• Novelists who want readers to feel what the characters are feeling
• Memoirists and essayists who want to write powerful emotions without over-explaining their own feelings or over-using reflection.
• Creative writing students and graduates of MFA programs who want to expand their writing craft with conscious practice.
• Developmental editors who want to grow their knowledge of white space, details, and juxtaposition in prose and better communicate that knowledge to their author clients.
• Writers hearing feedback that they are “telling” or info-dumping on the page
• Writers struggling with realistic dialogue, whether recreating a remembered scene or writing fiction.

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

Allison K Williams is the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book. She has edited and coached writers to Big Five and literary/university publishing deals and the New York Times and USA Today bestsellers lists. She’s guided essayists and humorists to publication in media including the New Yorker, Time, the Guardian, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Refinery29, Hippocampus, the Belladonna and TED Talks. As Social Media Editor for Brevity, she inspires thousands of writers with weekly blogs on craft and the writing life.As a memoirist, essayist, and travel journalist, Allison has written craft, culture and comedy for National Public Radio, CBC-Canada, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Creative Nonfiction,McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Kenyon Review Online,Travelers’ Tales and Flash Nonfiction Funny.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

Before the replay is sent, you may request a refund less a $10.00 processing fee. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

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