Tag Archives: idea to finished draft

For Writers: Working with Twinned and Twined Storylines

When I sat down to work out the outline for my Moving from Idea to Finished Draft, I came up with almost two dozen possible starting points for writing a story, including scene, title, taking an old plot, a character, dialog, a particular device, and more. As I finished writing it, those categories shifted around a little, sometimes sliding together, other times diverging, but I did think I’d managed to exhaust the possibilities…

…only to be proven wrong, of course. A week or so ago at the Surrey International Writers Conference I was absolutely delighted when an audience member hit me with a new one that I hadn’t considered at all.
Continue reading

Posted in classes & workshops | Tagged , , , , , , , | 34 Comments

Idea to Draft Finally No Longer Just a Draft

One of the things that I’ve been working on in the past six months is converting all of my live classes to on-demand versions. A few months ago I decided to try the Idea to Draft class and found it presented more problems than any of the others. I will spare you the saga, which I have blogged about elsewhere. Here’s the section on story basics, and here’s the one on what to do when you have just a scene. I will be teaching the live version, in which I work with students on their specific ideas, on July 9, which will be the last time I teach the live version in 2016.

I am very proud of this class, because I don’t think there are any other classes that take the same approach. I’m turning it into a book, which may be e-form only because it’s going to have a wordcount in the 100k+ range when you add in all the example stories. While Creating an Online Presence is, i think/hope, useful for writers on the business and career level, this is a book that works at the craft level and incorporates a lot of my story theory, the stuff that has evolved out of teaching and writing and thinking a lot about these things.
Continue reading

Posted in publications | Tagged , , | 25 Comments