Story Builder II: How to Strengthen Your Plot

Class Descriptions

How to Strengthen Your Plot (Four 2 hour classes)

In this class, we will focus on elements of craft that get your book working as a whole. So often, we become great at writing singular scenes, but lack the ability to stitch everything in a book together such that it will hold a reader's attention from page one to the end. We will take an in depth look at various structures, causality, escalation, unpredictability, driving questions, control of information, emotional diversity, binary opposition and pacing. Our focus is on practical application, generating new work, and bringing more clarity to your masterpiece-in-progress. Open to fiction and memoir writers at any stage of drafting.

Instructor Bio

Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014, by IndieBound as an Indie Next List Pick, by Yoga Journal as one of their Top Five Suggested Summer Reads and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Prior to earning her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, Rachel worked for the Forest Service in Alaska studying bears, raptors and songbirds. She is on faculty at Wilkes University’s low-residency MFA program, Regis University’s low-residency MFA program, and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018. She is the owner of Sandstone Editing where she works with authors one on one to help them get their books ready for publication. Rachel’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Sun, Gettysburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, River Teeth, Alaska Women Speak and Fly Fishing New England. For more information visit https://rachelweaver.net/

Class Information

Date & Time:

Wednesday - July 17, July 31, Aug 14, Aug 21

9am-11am EST (New York)

9pm-11pm CST (Beijing)

Location: Zoom

Language: English