Learning to See What the Page Needs

Editor’s Note: StoryCraft is part of the Substack Her Stories: Writing Craft and Community at the Story Circle Network (SCN). The goal is to share wisdom and techniques for improving your writing and your writing life. We don’t usually post pieces that focus on a course offering, although writers are welcome to include a link to their offerings in their bios. We are making this exception because it is offered through our organization and dovetails with StoryCraft’s goal. If you are not a member of Story Circle Network, we hope this post will encourage you to visit our website and see what our community offers.

Jude Walsh, Editor

This fall, I will be offering a nine-month Zoom class for Story Circle Network, The Art and Craft of Storytelling, built around a question I’ve become increasingly interested in: What happens when we stop rushing through craft and give ourselves time to really learn it?

From September through May, we’ll devote each month to one essential area of storytelling.

We’ll begin with the foundation: Why are you telling this story? Who is your reader? What are you promising that reader when you invite them into the piece?

Then, month by month, we’ll turn our attention to character, desire and stakes, action and meaningful choice, point of view and interiority, setting and sensory detail, dialogue and subtext, scene and structure, voice and story world, and finally revision.

The idea isn’t simply to learn what these terms mean. It is to spend enough time with each one that we begin to recognize what it can do on the page.

And the course is intentionally designed so that you don’t have to be on Zoom every week.

Half of our work each month will be asynchronous. There will be two prerecorded craft lessons, along with handouts and exercises, that you can watch and work through on your own time.

We’ll meet live only twice a month.

The first meeting will be our Craft Lab. We’ll take the ideas from the lessons and play with them: writing, revising, comparing possibilities, and seeing what happens when we make a different craft choice.

The second meeting will be our Writers Salon. Participants who want to read can share their work, and the rest of us will have an opportunity to listen, not for simply whether we “like” a piece, but for how the craft is working.

That distinction can make a big difference in our journey as writers.

I want us to develop the ability to say, “I think this scene needs more pressure,” or “I want to get closer to the narrator’s interior experience,” or “The dialogue is telling me something I’d rather discover through subtext.”

Those are useful observations. More importantly, they give us somewhere to go when we revise.

The course is designed for writers of fiction, memoir, personal essay, and narrative nonfiction. A novelist and an essayist may use scene differently. “Change” may mean an external action in one piece and a shift in understanding in another. But all of us are trying to create an experience that carries a reader from the beginning of a piece to somewhere they could not quite have reached without it.

Over the course of nine months, I hope that we’ll become more deliberate writers—not by loading ourselves down with rules, but by expanding the number of choices we know how to make.

Sometimes the difference between a page that is good and one that springs to life before our eyes is surprisingly small.

We just have to learn how to see it.

Please click here to learn more: https://www.storycircle.org/class/the-art-and-craft-of-storytelling-9-month-online-course/

Len Leatherwood, the Program Coordinator for SCN’s Online Classes program, has been teaching writing privately to students in California for the past 26 years. She is a nationally recognized writing coach and award-winning author. Len has published work in flash fiction and nonfiction and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. Her novel, Hope in a Time of Dying, won the American Fiction Award in the LBGTQ+ category. Her blog, 20 Minutes a Day, can be found at lenleatherwood.com.

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