Flash Draft Your Book: Using Dramatic Structure to Know Where You’re Going—and How to Get There

REGISTER NOW  $35

Fiction and Nonfiction

Beyond the five-act, the three-act, or the Hero’s Journey, how can you actually use structure to revise scenes and strengthen your book? 

Ready for a big revision? Or plotting a new manuscript? Make it easier—and make your book publishable—with structure.

What happened may be interesting—but the choices you or your characters make when faced with obstacles are compelling. These choices anchor turning-point scenes, the key moments in your book that keep readers turning pages, where they discover new information and gain new insight with the people on the page. Structure helps us outline these moments, but it also helps us revise, by editing to make the scene fit the structure or the structure fit the scene.

We’ll go in-depth on one, flexible structure that works for both active and “quiet” books in all genres. Gain a clear understanding of five key scenes, and how each one propels the action and deepens the meaning of your story. Then we’ll live-edit participant work to show how a scene’s structural location tells us whether to revise for more tension or a feeling of release, whether a character needs more depth or to pass through more quickly.

Whether you’re revising or writing from scratch, you’ll create a powerful plot with engaging characters and a strong hook that pulls in agents, publishers and readers—and create a structural map to guide your own work.

You’ll receive the slides, and a workbook with structure worksheets.

This is a TWO-HOUR session, with 20 minutes of writing time in the middle. 

• 40 minutes – Learn dramatic structure through five key scenes and what each does to move the book forward.
• 10 minutes – Q&A to fully understand and apply the information.
• 20 minutes – Revise one of your key scenes to raise tension, bring the reader in, increase conflict, or emphasize a dramatic moment. Allison will continue taking questions in the chat. OPTIONAL: volunteer for live-editing and upload your scene as a Word doc or docx to a Google Drive.
• 40 minutes – Allison will live-edit pages shared on screen, noting where the writer is succeeding in the purpose of the scene, and what revisions she suggests to make the prose even more effective. During live edits, she’ll call out specific techniques and tips for everyone to apply to their own work, right away. 
• 10 minutes – Q&A and planning your writing from here.

In this webinar: 

• ESTABLISH your dramatic question & set up a satisfying answer.
• PLOT five turning points: the most important scenes for your story
• UNDERSTAND how dramatic structure helps plot fiction and shape memoir
• CREATE mystery and tension to keep the reader turning pages
• FOCUS your writing time on what actually belongs in your book

This webinar is suitable for memoirists and novelists at all levels, with an idea, a draft, or an overwhelming pile of potential material.

Who should attend:

• Novelists with an idea who need a plan
• Memoirists whose draft has “gotten away from them” and needs shape and focus
• Writers working on a second book…who’d like the process to move faster this time!
• Writers hearing feedback that their book lacks tension, needs a stronger hook, or the story is “hard to follow” or “didn’t grab the reader”
• Developmental editors who want to grow their knowledge of story and structure and better communicate that knowledge to their author clients.
• “Plotters” who want to build on the structure they have with more freedom and creativity, and “Pantsers” who need to anchor and focus their storyline

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

ALLISON K WILLIAMS is the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book. She’s helped writers sell to Big Five and literary publishers, hit the NYT Bestseller list, and sign multi-book deals. She’s guided essayists and humorists to publication in media including the New Yorker, Time, the Guardian, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Refinery29, Hippocampus, the Belladonna and TED Talks. As Social Media Editor for Brevity, she inspires thousands of writers with weekly blogs on craft and the writing life.

Allison works with literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction, and is familiar with the conventions of most genres. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and spent 20 years as a circus aerialist and acrobat before writing and editing full-time. 

Student Testimonials:

“Allison teaches incredibly well, not only with a vast pool of writing-craft knowledge and impressive retention of other people’s stories, but in the way she uses humor, psychological insight, and accountability to engage and inspire us. (Watching Allison edit a piece on the screen in real-time was nothing short of magic!) I came away from that extraordinary week a changed person—tired in a good way, and happy and excited to be on a path that felt good to me, and still does.”– Heidi Croot

“My work with Allison was life-changing. As a result of my manuscript revision, an agent who had given me a ‘Revise and Resubmit’ offered to represent me, then sold the book to Penguin Random House!”– Karen Fine, D.V.M, author of NYT bestseller, The Other Family Doctor

“I don’t need a cheerleader to tell me my story is important, I need no-nonsense how-to. This was that! THANK YOU!!!!”– Jamie Beth Cohen

“Allison understands at a molecular level what makes prose work. As a sounding board, beta reader, and drop-everything-I’m-doing-to-meet-her coffeehouse workshop partner, Allison has made my writing better. Let her do that for you.”– Christopher Buehlman, author of The Blacktongue Thief

Questions? Please email Info@craft-talks.com