Creative Lab Syllabus
Description:
From big-picture assessments dealing with theme, world building, and character arcs to fine tuning your pacing, language, and voice, this roll-up-your-sleeves and rewrite workshop will get you started on a baker’s dozen revision jobs to craft your story into the best version of itself. You'll leave with an overflowing toolbox of revision strategies for your current WIP and beyond.
Prerequisites:
This Creative Lab will be most worthwhile and productive for those who bring a completed rough draft of a novel or a partial draft that is well underway. Please bring your novel, either on your laptop or printed out with plenty of space for notes, as well as a notebook, pen or pencil, and your laptop if you wish. Please also bring one or more mentor texts – beloved and well-crafted published novels that feel the way you’d like your finished novel to feel, whether that’s heartwarming, terrifying and thrilling, hilarious, magical, sad, mysterious, or something else.
Schedule:
- Introduction (5 minutes)
- One-sentence story statements to guide revision (10 minutes)
- Identifying your character’s knot (15 minutes)
- Guided writing to deepen character development (15 minutes)
- Learning from Mentor Texts – Character Introductions (10 minutes)
- Rewriting Time: Using best practices to rewrite a character’s first appearance (10 minutes)
- Sharing, discussion, and Q&A (15 minutes)
- Coffee/snack/stretch/bathroom break (10 minutes)
- World Building and Revision – Story-specific to-do lists (10 minutes)
- Learning from Mentor Texts – Language and Pacing (10 minutes)
- Rewriting Time: Using sentence structure to enhance mood & pacing. (10 minutes)
- Small-group discussions: Identifying moments of tension, building suspense, and raising the stakes. (15 minutes)
- Big-picture Revision Charts – Overview (10 minutes)
- Work time on big-picture charts (20 minutes)
- Final Q&A (10 minutes)
- Creating post-conference revision to-do lists (5 minutes)
Objectives:
- Participants will:
- Identify the heart, or spine, of their novel to guide revision
- Discover the “knots” that influence and complicate characters’ choices
- Analyze character introductions from successful MG and YA novels
- Practice guided free-writes to elicit deeper character development
- Revise a first-impression passage, making use of best practices for characterization
- Identify a world-building to-do list, specific to a novel’s fantastical or realistic setting
- Analyze pacing decisions in mentor texts as well as manuscripts, with an eye on identifying and addressing pacing issues
- Identify passages where language helps to drive mood and pacing in mentor texts
- Rewrite scenes with varying sentence and paragraph lengths to achieve mood and pacing goals.
- Collaborate with colleagues to identify and strengthen moments of tension in stories
- Create a big-picture revision chart to identify plot holes, map character relationships, and discover opportunities to strengthen themes.
- Make a post-workshop revision to-do list to guide next steps after the conference.
