Worldbuilding: Landscapes Our Feet Can't Tread - But What if They Could?
Summary:
Most parts of volcanoes, glaciers, and the sea floor are closed to us, but what would they be like if we had the ability to explore them first-hand?
Description:
Most parts of volcanoes, glaciers, and the sea floor are closed to us, but what would they be like if we had the ability to explore them first-hand? How would our experience of terrain shift if we bypassed constraints of mass, time, and scale?
Scott Rice-Snow is a professor of Geological Sciences at Ball State University in Indiana.
Find out what it takes to truly master the written form. From point-of-view and punctuation to dialogue tags and scene breaks, learn the basic techniques that will help you to succeed as a writer.
Writer's Craft: Avoiding the Exxon Valdez Infodump
Summary:
The infodump! Dreaded bane of interesting SF/F... or is it? Learn how to throw huge amounts of information at your audience elegantly, naturally, and subtly.
Description:
The INFODUMP... that infamous scene where characters lecture the reader for fifty pages on everything they'll ever need to know in case they want a PhD in the writer's work. Spare your readers-- there's a better, easier way to feed them clues! This presentation will explore a variety of techniques for worldbuilding and information presentation that can give your reader massive amounts of painless knowledge, often without them even realizing it...
Find out how to put your characters through the proverbial (or perhaps literal) ringer in a way that pushes them to their limits but doesn’t feel like unnecessary abuse.
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.
Characters will give you everything else, they bring their own world and plot. How do you come up with ones that are interesting and not cliches? An interactive workshop.
Description:
A man comes through the door with a gun! Wait, what kind of man? An old man? A child? A woman? A white man? A black man? A man with zebra stripes? An alien? An elf? A man in a wheelchair? An old elf in a wheelchair comes through the door with a gun -- why, this story is more interesting already! A fun interactive workshop. Bring your imagination and come prepared to put it to work.
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.