Master the fundamentals of dramatic storytelling while eliminating the dead wood that drags down your prose in this four-week master class with Craig Clevenger.
Your Instructor: Craig Clevenger (author of The Contortionist's Handbook and Dermaphoria)
Where: Online — Available everywhere!
When: This class is not currently enrolling. To be notified when it is offered again, Click Here
Enrollment: Limited to 20 Students
Price: $395
Class Description
This four-week course will give you the structure and tools to take your writing to a new level.
Craig's exclusive lectures have been shaped through years of experience and road-tested through previous intensive classes. These are road scholar dissertations that run into the thousands of words but are so engaging and fun to read, you'll be amazed -- each lecture charged with wisdom, experience, and insight into the writer’s craft, and carried along by the energy and wit of an author who practices what he preaches.
What’s more… each of Craig’s lectures provides a handful of unique and specific tools that function together as an interlocking set. You'll get a new edge as we build a genuine toolbox of functional synergistic ideas that work as a system to strengthen your prose…making it clean, uncomplicated, and effective, while preserving and enabling subtle nuances of voice or style. You'll learn that style is not synonymous with bloat. And you'll get that realization not just intellectually, but in practice.
Finally, this is your chance to learn directly from one of our most popular and sought-out authors and master teachers.
What This Class Covers
Here's the rundown from Craig:
Week One: “This is a Bloke You Know,” Status and Verbal Transactions
This is material adapted from a particular method of improvisational theater. We discuss “status” as distinct from “motivation”; not as who the characters are in their social standing, but who they are by virtue of their behavior. This lesson focuses almost exclusively on dialogue, and is very likely going to be new territory for most of you. It was originally one of the later lectures in past courses, but was such a brainload that it warranted detailed follow-up discussion.
Week Two: “What Would Lou Do?” Status and Non-Verbal Transactions
A slightly less meaty follow-up to the very meaty week one lecture. It’s less about dialogue, and more about all of those fidgets, twitches, gulps that your characters do when they’re not talking, as well as championing the much-maligned use of “said.”
Week Three: “Shit Happens,” Where Stories Come From
The first two weeks are about the tiniest components of story telling. We don’t zoom out to the larger issue of plot until week three because I like to present the ups and downs of the story’s plot as a macro version of the ups and downs of characters’ dialogue. With the first two weeks behind us, we start looking at the basic building blocks of stories. This is most often where writers get mired in creative quicksand. Well, at least I do.
Week Four: “The Weight of Each Word”
This is where you learn why it takes yours truly five bloody years to finish a third novel and in that time has written only a handful of short stories to speak of. In week four, we’ll learn to pull apart each and every sentence, parse it word for word, and in general fully experience life as only one can with a crippling case of literary OCD. Week four is my favorite. It may not be yours.
Goals Of This Class
- Harness the power of status play to create dynamic scenes
- Transform your dialogue into a microcosm of dramatic conflict
- Learn the crucial balance of verbal and non-verbal exchanges
- Explore and create events - the building blocks of your story
- Overcome the most common problem for all writers: What happens next?
- Master self-editing skills as you examine: The weight of each word
Additional Info
Video Preview Of Class
