Line editing involves editing sentence by sentence (or line by line) to upgrade the prose, always keeping craft in mind. A line edit ensures that your book’s content is consistent while its language is creative and concise. Publishers used to provide line editors for accepted manuscripts. No longer. You are now your own line editor.…

With great dialogue, you can almost feel readers lean in to the page so they won’t miss a word. Every word counts. In this seminar, you’ll find the best ways to make your characters’ dialogue both dynamic and natural as well as unique to their specific character. You’ll discover how to avoid chit-chat and write…

Creating a hero (protagonist) for a story sounds simple. This is the person we care about, root for, want to protect. But it is one thing to write a likeable character and another to write a compelling character. Many writers have difficulty rounding out their heroes, warts and all. Most of us have picked up…

Are you interested in writing steamy scenes in your fiction—without sacrificing story and character? This workshop will dive into the ins and outs of great sex scenes. We’ll look at the commonalities between literary sex scenes and their less salacious cousin, action scenes, and examine how sex can serve as a mode of character development.…

Sauron. Hannibal Lecter. Nurse Ratchet. Some of the most fascinating characters in literature aren’t the heroes, but the villains. In this workshop, we’ll discuss ways to that our villains are as fully developed as their more heroic counterparts. We’ll look at how the maxim “The best villain is the hero of their own story” plays…