£35
Fiction • 2 hours • 4 sections of 26–32 mins each
Shifting between scenes is an invisible skill: done well, no-one notices; done badly, readers flip back and forth through the book, baffled. The techniques to keep the reader orientated about characters, events, and time will keep your story running smoothly and hugely enrich it. And they all come together, with a few extras, to help you handle flashbacks like a pro.
We need each other, as writers, for encouragement, feedback, and to share the experience. As part of the course, you get FREE membership of The Writers' Greenhouse Community:
After the first Story Elements course in 2011, I ran an ongoing Novel Writing course for five years, designing lessons around whatever my students needed. Surprising themes began to emerge. One was how to keep readers from getting confused: about who characters were, what was happening before, how much time had passed, or how an idea worked. In 2014, I gathered those together into a full-day workshop for the Summer of Writing in Oxford: Orientating the Reader.
Over the next 10 years, it became one of the most regularly voted-in workshops. Every aspect was tested, refined, and retested, through in-person and virtual classes, with students of every level.
Throughout, my students and I have been constantly thrilled at how creative ‘orientating the reader’ is. It’s both a crucial tool for story-writing and a process of exciting discovery. Wherever you are in your writing, I hope you enjoy the new tools and discoveries it gives you.
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