Category: Adding Depth to Your Fiction

May 28, 2010 / Adding Depth to Your Fiction, Cuppa, Lisa Samson / 8 Comments »

Lisa, Me, Tea & Thee

A couple weeks ago, the brilliant Lisa Samson and I taught our first Adding Depth To Your Fiction workshop in Orlando. We had a fabulous time getting to know the writers in our very first class and helping them mine for the sublime in their fiction.

While there, she and I and our agent Chip MacGregor, who coordinated the workshop with Tiff Colter, were talking about Lisa’s new tea shop that she just opened in Lexington and hey, Lisa said, wouldn’t it be great to have the next Adding Depth workshop at Cuppa!

It took me a nano-second to say I LOVE that idea. So I am thrilled to announce our next Adding Depth workshop will be at the Cuppa, Lisa Samson’s chic and sweet tea shop in Lexington, Kentucky. The dates are July 23-24 and you can get all the details at The Masters Seminar website.

I look at this darling picture of Lisa at Cuppa and that warm, sunny room and I can smell her organic, all-free-trade tea, and the homemade scones and I just know we’ve got the absolute best environment for writerly types to jump into the writing lab and get artistically serious.

Lisa is a fantastic partner to teach with and a sweet soul. She will be the keynote speaker at The Christy Awards this year and is also up for an award in the Contemporary Stand-Alone category, a familiar place for her. Her flair for prosey greatness has been wowing Christy judges for years.

If you’re a fiction writer or you know a fiction writer who has been looking for a writing workshop that is small and intimate (we keep it to 10-12 peeps), tell them about the July 23-24 event at Cuppa. I don’t like commercials on blogs, so this will be the one time I brag on this. It’s going to be grand. . .

April 12, 2010 / Adding Depth to Your Fiction, MacGregor Literary / 3 Comments »

Plunging the depths

Someone once said to me, not so long ago, “You’ve written a dozen books! Must be the easiest gig in the world now.”

Yeah, I thought that once, too. That writing was like brain surgery, the more you did it, the easier it would get.

In truth, the more I write, the harder it gets. I’ve said this before on other blogs that I raise the bar each time I finish a book and chart a course for a new one. I want the next book to be exponentially better than the one before it. But I still start at the same place every time – on page 1 with nothing but a lot of white staring at me and a teasing, blinking cursor accentuating all that empty space.

I want each successive book to plunge deeper, to snag more acutely the reader in the most tender and savage of ways, so that my books are to them memorable, unique and evocative. The best books I’ve read are the ones whose prose is so lovely and sharp you don’t even know you’re bleeding.

Writing of that caliber reads easy and fluid but churning it out can be like mining for gems in solid granite. But it can be done. It should be done. But it takes a concerted effort. At least for me, it does. And there’s no better place to hone your mining skills than in the company of other miners.

The wildly talented Lisa Samson and I are teaming up to teach a two-day intensive and intimate fiction workshop called Adding Depth to Your Fiction that will be offered twice this year in two different spots in the nation. The first one is coming up May 7-8 in Orlando and a second one is set for Detroit in July, as part of the Masters Seminar series sponsored by Command Performance and MacGregor Literary. Lisa and I have been working on our class materials for this first workshop, and I must say I am getting more excited every day to share with writers what I have learned about adding depth and dimension to a story. And I love the idea that ours will be an intimate group which means there will be lots of indepth, one-on-one feedback, insights and mentoring.

If you’re a novelist or you know a novelist, pass on the above link to them. We’re going to have an amazing time together spelunking in the prose cave with our axes, picks and little yellow hats with the lights on top.

On Friday, why I love Phantom of the Opera. See you then . . .