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Tag Archives: f&sf writing classes
How to Apply for My Online Short Story Workshop
I haven’t offered my short story workshop in about five years but I am going to do so in July/August, and there will be an application/selection process. I know that the international folks get cheated by the times often, so this quarter I will be offering two sections during the day. (If I decide to teach it again next quarter I will offer two sections, one on the weekend and one in the evening.) Continue reading
CyberMonday Coupons for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers
If you’re gift-buying, be aware you can gift one of my classes, both live and on-demand ones! Just drop me a line about what you’d like to do and I’m happy to send the gift certificate in virtual or physical … Continue reading
Posted in classes & workshops
Tagged classes, f&sf writing classes, on-demand classes, online demands
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Advice for Attending a Writing Workshop
A student wrote in to let me know they’d made it into Odyssey, huzzah, and asked if I had any advice about attending a workshop. As a matter of fact I do. Like many things in life, you get more out of a workshop if you’re willing to invest a little effort beforehand, during, and afterward.
I went through a number of workshops in college at both the undergraduate and graduate level, but the place where I learned the most was Clarion West, a six week workshop in Seattle. My instructors were Octavia Butler, Andy Duncan, L. Timmel Duchamp, Connie Willis, Gordon van Gelder, and Michael Swanwick; my classmates included Ann Leckie, E.C.Myers, Rashida Smith, and Rachel Swirsky, among others. If you read a lot of F&SF, you may recognize many of those names and realize how incredibly privileged I was to be part of that year.
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Live Classes for April through June 2017
Here’s the latest roster of live classes for the Rambo Academy of Wayward Writers, with links to descriptions. Info that you may want to know: Logistics: Classes are taught online. You need internet connectivity and a microphone at a minimum; … Continue reading
Posted in classes & workshops
Tagged classes, f&sf writing classes, f&sf writing classes online
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More From Moving from Idea to Draft
Having finished up the big April projects, one of the main things I want to get accomplished this month is getting the on-demand version of the Moving From Idea to Draft online writing class up along with the existing on-demand classes.
This has proven a somewhat monumental task, because the needs of the on-demand version are very different than those of the live class. In the live workshops, which are limited to eight students, everyone comes in with a two-three sentence description of their idea, and we work from there, adapting the material to what they’ve brought into class.
For the on-demand version, I started by trying to identify all the different ways there are into a story, a number that fluctuates in the realm of two dozen, depending on how finely I want to draw distinctions.
What I’ve done with each possible path is identify what it is, what it gives you as a starting point, things you will want to consider, possible pitfalls, next steps for fleshing it out, and a set of exercises (with basic and overachievers’ versions) to help explore the starting point. I finish, in what I am still worried may be an excessively egotistic move, by providing a story of mine that started in that way and some notes on its development from the starting point.
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