Big Focus: Using Themes to Revise and Streamline Your Drafts

REGISTER NOW    $25 | Nonfiction

Identifying thematic currents in a draft can illuminate your key ideas and guide the revision process. In this webinar, we’ll explore how.

In early drafts, it’s often worth embracing a “messy,” exploratory approach. But eventually, most essays and memoirs will need to be reined in or reshaped to give the material more force and coherence. One way to tackle this sculpting process is to seek out themes – big ideas or concepts that bubble up naturally in the work — and use those organic underlying threads to guide your decisions about what sticks and what doesn’t, where to trim and where to dig deeper, and what really sits at the project’s heart.

In this webinar, we’ll explore how to identify core themes in your work, and how to use those themes to make better decisions as you revise. Looking at short examples, we’ll consider the interplay between theme and form, and discuss how themes can influence everything from structure to specific word choices. We’ll also do targeted exercises that you can apply to your current writings. You’ll leave with an understanding of how “theme” is more than an abstract term from English class; it can be an essential tool. 

In this webinar you will…

• EXPLORE how to identify existing themes in your drafts
• DISCOVER how those themes can guide the process of developing and strengthening the work.
• LEARN to distinguish between “major” and “minor” themes and decide which themes deserve more weight and attention in your essay or memoir.  
• DEEPEN your knowledge of how theme works on multiple levels: from big-picture structure to granular word choice. 
• CHALLENGE yourself to see your work with a more “objective” eye, as a way of making your vision stronger.

This webinar is ideal for…

• Writers unsure of how theme works in personal nonfiction, or who want to understand theme more deeply
• Writers who’ve written a first draft they would like to take to the next level
• Writers seeking more depth and focus in their writing projects
• Writers who feel uncertain about revision and would like to learn to embrace it

Closed captioning is available ✔
All registrants receive the recording ✔

YOUR PRESENTER

Dorian Fox is a writer and freelance editor whose essays and articles have appeared in Brevity, The Rumpus, Gay Magazine, Booth, The Pinch, Short Reads, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. He lives in Boston and teaches creative writing courses through GrubStreet and Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop. Find more about his work at dorianfox.com.

Questions? Please email info@craft-talks.com