Learn to bring more immediacy and urgency to your prose by replicating how life feels in the moment, crafting scenes that capture the texture of actual living.

Fiction & Nonfiction

Our lives—and our characters’ lives—unfold in distinct moments – specific times, particular places, intimate details – rather than through explanatory passages and abstract interpretation. In this webinar, we will practice bringing more immediacy and urgency to our prose by replicating how life feels in the moment, and crafting scenes that capture the texture of actual living.

Whether working with our own remembered lives in memoir, or our characters’ constructed lives in fiction, rather than “naming” a character’s emotional reactions, let the reader experience the discrete moments that bring the significant feeling forward. We will look at examples from both memoir and fiction and discuss how to use the techniques in your work. Allison and Dinty will also “improvise” scenes, writing in the moment to illustrate how details accumulate to create a whole.

You’ll leave with a better understanding of your craft, clear ideas to enhance your scenes, and prompts and nudges to get you started on new work or revision.

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In this webinar, you will:

• EXPLORE how scenes can resonate more powerfully by replicating “real” life events
• DISCOVER ways to increase the immediacy and urgency of your story
• LEARN HOW deliberate craft choices create a powerful emotional connection
• WATCH Allison and Dinty improvise scene writing and editing live on Zoom

This webinar is ideal for:

• Writers sick to death of hearing “show don’t tell” and unsure how to act on that feedback
• Writers who have been told they “Explain too much.”
• Writers who’d like their work to immediately capture attention and engage agents, editors and readers.
• Writers with a piece that’s been widely submitted and rejected
• Memoirists needing new ways to recreate intensity of feeling on the page
• Novelists struggling with their genre, who need to embrace tropes while keeping them fresh.

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

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

DINTY W. MOORE  is author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell With It, and the writing guides Crafting the Personal Essay and The Mindful Writer, among other books. He has published essays and stories in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Short Reads, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction.

ALLISON K WILLIAMS is the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book. She’s helped writers sell to Big Five and literary publishers, hit the NYT Bestseller list, and sign multi-book deals. 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. Allison works with literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction, as well as essays, short fiction, and and social platform. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and spent 20 years as a circus aerialist and acrobat before writing and editing full-time.

Questions? Please email Info@craft-talks.com

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