From Begun to Done:
10 Problems With Your First Draft and How to Fix Them with Sara Kocek
Saturday, January 18 from 10 AM – 4 PM
$165 per student (10% off for WLT and SCBWI members)
Writing to the end of your first draft exposes all the problems with your dazzling beginning—the flat characters, plot loose ends, weaknesses in your world-building, and hidden agendas. This fun, fast-paced workshop will use a combination of lecture, handouts, and brief writing sessions to cover scene construction, effective description within a scene, use of dialogue, different types of scenes, and the eternal problem of too-much exposition. No matter your genre, learn how to make your manuscript more appealing to readers and editors alike by scrubbing it clean of the top ten problems afflicting most first drafts.
Who should attend?
- Writers of literary fiction or genre fiction (including mystery, thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction, YA, middle grade)
- Writers struggling to finish the first draft of a novel
- Writers whose finished novels are not gaining traction with literary agents
- NaNoWriMo writers who want to revise their novel draft
To register, Send email and an invoice for the cost of the class will be sent. Checks may be made payable to The Writing Barn and mailed to: The Writing Barn, 10202 Wommack Road, Austin, TX 78748.
Sara Kocek is the founder of Yellow Bird Editors and the author of the young adult novel Promise Me Something (Albert Whitman Teen, 2013). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, where she taught fiction and poetry to undergraduates. Prior to pursuing her MFA, Sara graduated with a B.A. in English from Yale University, where she worked as a Writing Fellow, tutoring undergraduate and graduate students in academic and creative writing. A former full-time editorial intern at Random House and Penguin, she now lives in Austin, Texas, where she worked recently as the Program Director for the Writers’ League of Texas. In addition to 5+ years of experience teaching and editing fiction, Sara has 7+ years of experience with college essay coaching for high school students.