Thanks to the success of our latest daylong and weekend Write Away Days, The Writing Barn is excited to award two $300 need-based scholarships to any writers interested in attending the Full Novel Revision Week, starting May 30th. In your application, please list yourself as a scholarship applicant, and supporting materials will be sent to you. Scholarships will only apply to 100-page critiques or full novels.
Are you working on heavy-hitting YA? A MG series? A literary thriller? Or anything in between? Would you like a thorough professional critique on your FULL novel? Are you looking for quiet time to revise for hours at a time? Would you like to make new writing connections with writer’s from around the country? If so, look no further–The Writing Barn’s 2015 Full Novel Revision Week is just what you have been looking for.
Featured Lectures:
“Dialogue: The Mechanics Of” by Tim Wynne-Jones, two-time winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, most recently for his thriller, Blink & Caution. His newest novel, released this year, is titled The Emperor of Any Place.
There are, simply stated, two kinds of narrative at work in a novel: scene and summary. It is, typically, in scene-work that the reader is closest to the action. The camera can dolly in tight on the characters, close enough to pick up every word and grumble, every shudder and wink. In this lecture, I will look at how that all works: not simply the dialogue but the connective tissue that holds the muscle of scene to the bones of plot.
“Emotion Drives the Motion” by Nicole Griffin,author of The Whole Stupid Way We Are, named one of Publishers Weekly’s Flying Start Authors of 2013.
Do you love creating characters but hate devising plot? Well, me, too. In this lecture, we’ll explore the ways in which plot can be derived from the ways your characters feel—even when they’re off-stage. After examining examples from some of Jane Austen’s books, I’ll highlight a specific process through which what happens in your novel can be created by thinking through your characters’ emotions and the ways in which their collisions and meetings with other characters can create that pesky plot.
It’s More than a Place: Crafting Settings that Matter by Joy Preble, author of The Sweet Dead Life series, and the soon to hit shelves, Finding Paris, which SLJ has called, “An intricate guessing game of sisterly devotion, romance, and quiet desperation.”
In its simplest terms, setting is the universe in which your story takes place. But setting is more than that. When used to its best and fullest capacity, setting becomes something that both reflects your characters and acts upon them. Think: The rich settings in Maggie Stiefvater’s works—her Raven Boys series’ town of Henrietta, Virginia with its juxtaposition of the staid, wealthy Aglionby Academy and the chaotic fullness of Blue Sargent’s house of psychics. Or Thisby Island in The Scorpio Races, strange and mystical backdrop to the water horse race to the death and how it impacts main character Puck. In essence, setting, when used properly, is a character, something that I recently mined as I wrote Finding Paris (April 21, 2015, Balzer and Bray), set primarily in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Both have quirky, hidden, not always pleasant layers that fit the truth underneath narrator Leo’s surfacely light road trip. In this lecture, we will explore all aspects of setting and how to craft it to bring forth layers and details not only in the your story’s physical universe, but in your characters themselves.
All attendees will be given the time, space, and creative energy to dig into their drafts or revisions, while attending craft lectures, group sharing, and community meals.
During this WEEK LONG INTENSIVE you will have the opportunity to:
- Attend faculty lectures, complete with Q&A and discussions
- Participate in extensive writing exercises led by an award-winning faculty
- Write and revise in your shared room at The Book House, on-the wooded 7.5-acre grounds, or on the party porch
- Benefit from small group sessions and group discussions
- Enjoy an evening reading or two, as workshop participants and faculty read from their work
- Meet and mingle with workshop participants from throughout the country
- Enjoy delicious vegetarian breakfast and lunches
- Walk the hike and bike trail at Austin’s Town Lake
- Take a refreshing dip in Austin’s Barton Springs
- Tour Austin indie BookPeople and meet with staff to hear about how best to work with booksellers
- Bond with faculty over board games, meals, around the fire pit and on the party porch in the evenings
- Meet Austin authors who may drop by The Writing Barn to say a special hello to YOU! Check out our Visiting Authors/Special Guests.