Narrative Nonfiction and Fiction Workshop

Narrative Nonfiction and Fiction Workshop
Sundays, 1 pm in Santa Barbara

March 3, 10, 17 & 24

Literary agent and editor extraordinaire, Toni Lopopolo will help you craft your personal narrative into a marketable book. Toni, this month, asked top New York editors what they look for in a memoir manuscript and what they are publishing in 2019. Using their hot button demands, Toni has created a new writing workshop to help focus and fine-tune your personal story.

A former executive editor at Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, Toni knows what it takes to get a book published. Her highly successful “Tea with Toni” workshops bring area writers up to competitive speed in fiction and narrative nonfiction. Toni’s methods are strong yet constructive—meant to help you master the skills necessary to become a successful published author.

In the Memoir Workshop you’ll learn:

• How to create a distinctive voice
• Fiction techniques that make memoir intriguing and engrossing
• The art of detachment
• The elements that give a story universal appeal
• How to orchestrate story, characters, events.
• How to narrow the lens to achieve focus for today’s readers.
• If your memoir should be fictionalized
• If your memoir measures up to what’s published today
• What to include or leave out
• How to edit for interest and drama

…plus a reading list of classic memoirs and the best of new releases for memoir studies.

For Fiction writers, learn:

• The most Important skill: Voice
• How the author is silent in 21st Century Fiction
• Development of characters through deep Point of View
• The all-important Show vs. Tell
• To write in Scenes vs. Narration
• The importance of charged dialogue
• The importance of subtext in dialogue
• The importance of Interior Monologue
• How to create an intriguing agenda in your story
• How to evoke rather than describe
• How actions speak louder than adverbs
• The Importance of reading like a writer
• The importance of mastering the skill of Self-Editing
• The importance of mastering: structure, setting, pace, narrative drive, beats, tension, conflict, genre, and writing style for 21st Century conventions
• And much more—to create a marketable novel for today’s readers

Workshop limited to six writers who must submit the first five pages of their first chapter before acceptance.

This is a unique opportunity to learn from literary agent and professional editor, who will teach the steps necessary to improve the quality of your writing skills and techniques. This development takes place in a small group of dedicated energetic writers who can survive and prosper from intense training sessions.

If you really want your work critically analyzed and get the tough love needed to polish the manuscript for publication, take this unique opportunity to get ahead of the game.

For fiction writers as well as memoir writers, you will raise the quality of your writing, learn where your story really starts, learn to identify “habit” words and how to kill them, discover the right point of view (POV) to tell the story, learn to break the story into scenes, learn to listen to your own work read aloud and keep yourself as an author out of the work, discover how to develop a voice appropriate to the novel at hand, get rid of “hack” habits, as well as learn the reality of the book publishing market as it exists today.

Workshop limited to six writers
Writers must submit the first five pages of their first chapter before acceptance.

Sundays, 1 pm in Santa Barbara
Cost: $265 for 4 Sunday sessions
Location: Private home in Santa Barbara, CA

If the dates above don’t work for you, contact Toni. For further information please email Toni or phone/text (215) 353-1151.