4-Week: Story Builder II—Your Plot

Welcome to Story Builder!
This series of four classes is co-taught by Rachel Weaver and Erika Krouse, and covers the four major aspects of crafting your story: tension, plot, characterization, and scene. Each session is four weeks long, and there are four sessions in the entire series. You can take one session or all four, chronologically or in any order you like, according to your needs. These classes will include many of the following topics, but will be tailored to the needs of the writers attending.

This class is designed for prose writers working on novels, memoirs, essays, or short stories. These fast-paced courses work on a cycle of lecture, discussion, and application. The instructor will explore a specific craft element (i.e. conflict, time, setting, protagonists, and more), give a few short examples, open the topic for discussion. After discussion, writers will use exercises to apply the concepts to their own works. We'll focus on practical application rather than theory alone; writers should come with a concrete story idea to which they can apply the week's topics. Writers can expect to generate new writing for a current work-in-progress and gain a broader understanding of all the major elements of story. Beyond general discussion, we won't be doing any workshopping in this class.

Story Builder II—Your Plot: In this edition of Story Builder, we'll 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'll 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 ideas and bringing more clarity to your masterpiece-in-progress.