Looking for a way to add conflict and suspense to your novel, chapters, and scenes? Then this workshop is for you. Whether you are a plotter or a pantser, you can apply this easy-to-use technique as you draft, during revision of your WIP, and even as a way to break through writer’s block.
In this workshop you will learn how to read your novel’s heartbeat like a surgeon. We will look at ways to visually map out your characters’ actions and reactions, follow their emotional highs and lows and in doing so create tension and conflict that flows through scenes, across chapters and unifies the entire novel.
Lesson 1: Electrifying Conflict
Lesson 2: Discovering Dilemmas, Decisions, and Problems Galore!
Lesson 3: Charging the Heartbeat of a Scene
Lesson 4: Stirring the Lifeblood of the Characters
Lesson 5: Mapping the Highs and the Lows of Your Story
Lesson 6: Breathing Life into the Whole Creation
Lesson 7: Flushing Out Writer’s Block
Lesson 8: Zigging and Zagging Your Way Through Your Writing Life.
About the Instructor:
Joan Koster
In a life full of misadventures, Joan Koster has had sunstroke on the top of a Greek mountainside while doing ethnographic research with shepherds, been stranded on the banks of the Rhine with no money and one chocolate bar, and while she has never been kidnapped, she has been abandoned on an uninhabited island in the middle of the wilderness for longer than she wants to remember. All of which makes curling up on a Nova Scotia beach writing historical novels of forgotten women a true enjoyment.
An award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction works in the fields of ethnography, education, and the arts. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies including the recently release Eve of Love. She has received awards from Women on Writing, Stone Thread Publishing, Tryst Literary Magazine, and Winning Writers. Under the penname, Zara West, she has published the award-winning romantic thriller series The Skin Quartet. She is currently in the process of writing a historical fiction series about nineteenth-century women who never should have been forgotten. Book 1 That Dickinson Girl released in November. She loves mentoring writers and has produced the top selling writing craft series Write for Success.
