Examine different approaches to creating backstories for your characters, and find out just how much time and effort you need to put into fleshing out your characters before you start writing.
Writer's Craft: Characters That Aren't Reflections of You
Summary:
Unearth new ways to create characters with unique personalities while still drawing on personal experience. Learn to create a cast of true individuals rather than just different versions of you.
Writer's Craft: Comedy Gold - The Art, Science, & Non-Sequitur of Writing Humor
Summary:
You don't have to be born funny to tell a good joke, and even if you WERE born funny your jokes can be better. The tools and techniques you need are here. Prepare to laugh while taking notes.
Description:
Howard Tayler has been a student of humor ever since discovering that he could use words to send milk up someone else's nose. For decades he thought, like most people, that humor was a gift, and that the tricks for workshopping a good joke couldn't do more than fine tune the funny that was already there. He is quite happy to have been wrong. Humor, like cross-stitch, phlebotomy, and rocket science, is something people can learn to excel at, even if they weren't born telling lactate-launching lunchroom gags. In this presentation, Howard will lay down the basics, and then show you the tools you'll need to begin putting polished humor in your own works. Using the research of McGraw & Warner as a foundation, he’ll draw techniques from the works of Adams, Adams, Gaffigan, Pratchett, Niven, Twain, Watterson, and more. Don’t forget to take notes, don’t bring tomatoes, and do not drink milk.
Learn how to convince your reader to truly care about your characters and the challenges they face. Get tips for plucking at the reader’s emotional heartstrings.
Look at ways to create ideas that truly are different from what has come before—or at least learn to help readers feel like they’re experiencing something unique in your story.
Writer's Craft: Dialogue, It Is Not Just People Talking!
Summary:
Join award-winning author Maxwell Alexander Drake as he gives you some insights on how to craft dialogue that will not only sound realistic, but be relevant to your story.
Description:
Dialogue - that is, well written dialogue in fiction - is one of the hardest things to master. That's because dialogue in fiction is not really people talking to each other. It is conversation with drama that also needs to move the plot of the story while giving the reader insight into the inner workings of your characters. Sounds like a lot? It is. Join award-winning author Maxwell Alexander Drake as he gives you some insights on how to craft dialogue that will not only sound realistic, but be relevant to your story.
During this class, you will gain insight into how to put your story together in a compelling way that will have your readers turning page after page to see what happens next.
Description:
Ever wonder how the really good books suck a reader in and hold their attention page after page. It's not the characters, nor the plot of the book. It is the way in which the author writes that separates their story from the pack. Join award-winning author Maxwell Alexander Drake as he presents his class "Don't Tell Your Story, Show It!" During this class, you will gain insight into how to put your story together in a compelling way that will have your readers turning page after page to see what happens next.
Explore the craft of creating truly epic scenes in your stories that capture the awe of epic vistas, the thundering power of an epic battle, or the emotional power of an epic victory.
Discover how fantasy fiction is evolving in the 21st century, what trends are happening, and where what worked well in the past fails to grab readers today.
Writer's Craft: Final Endings (Never to be Continued)
Summary:
Look at ways to wrap up a story that isn’t intended to be serialized or continue in other ways beyond the book the reader has in their hand. Discover the secrets to ending that story right.