A one-day workshop
or A five-week seminar
Bring your most tangled mess of a story, or your rats-nest of plot lines, or a dead-end tale you hope to revive, and instructor Jess Wells will help you get better at putting together the components of a great short fiction story. Your goal for the day: to work together to find the core theme of each of your pieces, the movement of your character’s growth, and the plot.
We'll examine:
- The difference between a short story and a novel
- A short history of the short story
- The five keys to a short story that works
- The turn-around that is key to the story
- The nuanced writing of one of the masters of the short story
“I love the short story: it’s my favorite literary form,” says Jess. “Not only is it a wonderful slice of life, a beautiful way to convey a theme, but it’s a great form for a writer who has a busy life or is just starting out. Building a publications list, getting some early success with short stories, is a stepping stone to the novel, though short stories are magnificent in their own right.”
A two-hour workshop
or A five-week seminar
Setting is not simple backdrop, like a green screen on which on film is shot. Setting in fiction plays an important role in theme, plot, genre, and even characterization. It’s no accident that your intrepid heroes have to ride through a narrow mountain pass: it’s the way the author forces friend and foe into a meeting. It’s helpful that your main character is the village doctor, hosting family after family during their crisis in a little room in the front of the house. Even the relentless dark and biting wind of a distant planet illustrates both the physical challenges facing the colony of scientists but also their brooding cruelty to one another.
Whether your write sci-fi, historicals, erotica, or modern fiction, your setting can make or break your story. In this one-day class, we’ll look at:
o What are the key to a well-drawn fictional world?
o What elements assist in creating an effective setting and better yet, an efficient setting that works hard for you in your story?
o How can a setting be drawn to challenge the protagonist in his/her quest?
o How can a setting allow the author to control movement of the characters and introduce diversity of events and characters?
We’ll look at the opening pages and/or the maps of a slew of well-known books from different genres, including
The Lathe of Heaven, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf, Perfume: Story of a Murderer, The Hobbit, and The World Beneath.
And then for fun, we’ll take a free-form map and create a world of our own to see what a setting requires. And of course we’ll tip our hats to the amazing power of a beautifully written setting that transports us, transfixes us, lets us smell the flowers of a foreign land.
A 1-2 hour workshop
A full day workshop
A five-week seminar
with Jess Wells
People everywhere wish they could find the time to express themselves. Meeting rooms, construction sites and classrooms are filled with people who can't re-orient their priorities to make room for art in their life.
Even those who identify themselves as artists are constantly plagued with a shortage of time to create, and students, ready to tackle a new life, need instruction on how to build a lifestyle that is conducive to their visions.
This workshop will:
• Empower the participants with practical, hands-on ways to carve out time for their art
• Instruct in priority building
• Confront the obstacles, internal and external, to a creative life
• Develop techniques for maximizing time
• Reveal the famous writers who produced great works of art while gainfully employed
• Provide guidance in building a writer’s life and budget
• Introduce the business work-ethic into the creative process
• Plan a new writer’s life that can start tomorrow
Through a combination of worksheets, discussion and lectures, participants will walk out with a plan of action that works!
Jess Wells is a recent recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Literature. She is the author of thirteen volumes of work, including the historical novel, The Mandrake Broom and the novels, AfterShocks, re-issued as a Triangle Classic by InsightOut Books, and The Price of Passion. She is the author of five collections of short stories, the editor of several volumes of non-fiction and fiction, and a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She has been employed for 22 years in Silicon Valley, usually self-employed, and is a single mother. If there's one thing she knows how to do, it's write with a demanding life!
A One-Day Workshop
and A Five-Week Writing Course
Historical fiction can transport you and your writing into worlds that are incredibly fun to write. Do you want to reintroduce a little-known hero/heroine into popular culture? Would you like to tell the sweeping saga of your own family’s struggle in America? And since any story more than 50 years in the past is considered historical fiction, sometimes one’s own childhood tale can be the source of your inspiration.
Although historical fiction is an increasingly popular and legitimate genre, it has its own unique demands. You can’t just throw a tapestry over the flat screen TV in your scene and call it historical. There are real differences between modern life and life in the past, which require real differences in your writing. And that, to me, is the greatest thing about it: it’s like a three-dimensional chess game with the bottom layer as the character’s story, the middle layer as the unique historical setting and events, and the top game being played with language.
Each week we’ll have a 30 minute lecture on an aspect of the craft of historical fiction and 20 minutes investigating research opportunities. Then, we’ll dive into a new section each week of one of the greats of historical fiction, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. We’ll also be taking short dives into the following material:
“The English Pupil”, a short story by Andrea Barrett
Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Aurel and also possibly
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
You’ll have take-home writing exercises that I hope will assist you in brainstorming or moving your work along. The last segment of the class will be spent on your specific project, looking either at plot development, character development, or assisting you in your research.
My goal is to help you identify an era and an area that speak to you, determine where and how to research, and when to stop researching. We’ll explore the requirements of accuracy vs. entertainment, discuss where to publish your historical work, and do what it takes, as a group, to move you toward your goal of creative, credible historical fiction.
Jess Wells is the author of numerous volumes of work, including the novel The Mandrake Broom (Firebrand, 2007), which dramatizes the fight to save medical knowledge during the witch-burning times in Europe 1465-1540. Her work on The Mandrake Broom earned her a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Literature to write her second historical novel, which will chronicle the early years of Christine de Pizan in the French court of Charles V.
Available for booking into your writer’s group, college, university, conference or art center, separately, or in conjunction with “Making Time for Creativity: How to Write with a Full-time Job.”
