Title: Tools of the Writer and How to Use Them

Instructor: Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., Ransom@RansomStephens.com

Details to Sign up for currently scheduled classes here!

Catalog Description:

To write stories and memoir that lock in readers the first step is to understand the tools. The second step is learning how to use them. Bring your story idea or manuscript and let’s get to work!

    “An earth shattering dive into fiction’s many vagaries.” – Andy Gloege

Abstract:

To write stories that grab readers – whether fiction or memoir – you have to understand your tools: point of view and characterization, dialog and description, showing and telling, metaphor and simile, pacing and voice, backstory and flashback, repetition and opposition. We examine every tool and see where, why and how they can be put to work constructing great stories.

“…shockingly stupendous.” - Peter Dudley

This course will enable you to:

  • Understand when to show and when to tell and when to show-and-tell.
  • Build tension and suspense by withholding information without sacrificing clarity.
  • Choose metaphors and similes that illustrate your prose and reflect your themes.
  • Understand the concept of literary level and how clarity of point, theme, and tone are maintained at each level.
  • Make the best use of repetition and opposition.
  • Recognize and use point of view to get the most out of your work.
  • Introduce backstory without losing momentum.
  • Learn the cost, value and effective construction of flashbacks.
  • Make pacing work by understanding the difference in how time passes for the reader, for the writer, and within the story.
  • Write dialog that locks in readers.
  • Understand the role of purple prose.
  • Make use of graphics.

“Enthusiastic, organized. You care that I get it.” – Linda Loveland Reid

Details:

The best format is a full day workshop or set of three two hour seminars, but the highpoints can be covered in a single 90 minute lecture. Specific elements of this course can be covered in a 50 minute speeches.

“Very concise. Exactly what I came for.” – Thonie Hevron

Syllabus

  • Introduction
    • Clarity in different types of prose
      • Instructive writing: how-to, manuals, technical writing
      • Essays, opinion
      • Storytelling – fiction and memoir
    • Summary of the tools
    • Storytelling
  • The literary level concept
    • Clarity, mood/tone, theme  sentence, paragraph, chapter, whole
    • Techniques for draft and revision
  • The role of description, analogy – simile and metaphor
  • Point of view
  • Backstory and flashbacks
  • Scenes: show vs tell
  • The irony of effective dialog
  • Tension and suspense
  • Time and pacing
  • The quagmires: forced details, purple prose vs voice, wily pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, etc.
  • Bringing it all together in your work

            • “Ransom has a breezy speaking style that helps audience members feel engaged and not lectured at.” – Linda McCabe

About the instructor:

Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., has been a writer and public speaker for 20 years. He has 1000s of hours classroom experience as a university professor, is the author of what the SF Chronicle called “a milestone not only for Ransom but for the book industry as well, as the first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing.…an ambitious first novel that sings of the heart and the scientific method as two parts of the same song,” The God Patent (Numina Press, www.TheGodPatent.com) He has also written over 200 articles, essays and anthology contributions on impossible subjects like quantum physics, the future of publishing, and parenting teenagers.