To see what, where, and when I’m currently scheduled to teach, please head over to my events page.
class catalog
I offer a variety of workshops on the craft and business of writing. Most can be customized for particular audiences, or expanded or contracted to fit your event’s schedule. I’m also available to develop a class with custom content designed specifically for your audience. Contact me for more information.
Beyond Goal + Conflict: A Better Way to Get Tension on Every Page
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Why a scene is necessary in a novel often has nothing to do with whether a character in that scene has a goal or whether that goal lies on the other side of an obstacle. It has to do with change. In other words, what knowledge, skills, or resources does the character have at the end of the scene that they didn’t have at the beginning? In this workshop, we’ll look at a new way to craft tension-packed scenes—not in terms of goal and conflict/obstacle, but in terms of analyzing and capitalizing on the power dynamic between characters in the scene, or between a lone character and his setting or situation. By ensuring your characters enter each scene with at least one physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual power imbalance, and by planning how that power will shift during the course of the scene (in terms of who has or will end up with more knowledge, skills, or resources related to the overall plot), then goals and conflicts will occur naturally, and tension will become inherent. Finally, we’ll see how crafting scenes like and then stringing them together logically is a valid method of plotting or outlining.
Comma, Semicolon, Hyphen, Dash: One Hour to Better Mechanics
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1 hour
Come get all your burning questions about proper punctuation answered! Appropriate for both fiction and nonfiction writers, this class will survey the differences between grammar and mechanics and cover 17 punctuation rules you can immediately put to use in your work.
Elbow Grease for Novelists: Turning Premise into Plot
Focus: Craft
Duration: 2-3 hours
Short description: If you have a great idea for a novel—freeze! Before you start writing, come learn how to evaluate the strength of your premise, and then meet the many plots and structures you can choose from in turning your premise to plot.
Long description: When a story idea strikes, it rarely strikes as a fully formed plot. Rather, it strikes as a premise, something like Character X in World Y will do Thing Z. One reason so many aspiring novelists struggle to complete even a rough draft is that they think premise is all they need to get started. But frustration sets in when their stories get lost in the weeds—often around 10K words. Another reason is that many aspiring writers don’t fully understand the difference between premise and plot; ask them what their book is about, and they’ll pitch you their premise, but ask them to talk about plot, and they’ll respond with a puzzled expression. This workshop is designed to help writers with a premise (a) recognize that it’s just a premise and (b) transform it into plot. This is where the magical feeling of having an exciting premise meets the elbow grease needed to give it structure.
Emotion in Fiction: Making Characters Real, Making Readers Feel
Focus: Craft
Duration: 3-4 hours
Memorable stories are rooted in emotion, and your ability to deliver an emotional experience time and time again often correlates to your success with readers. In this workshop, dive into how emotion informs your fiction from three different angles: Writer, Reader, and Character. Learn how to deepen readers’ emotional experience of your stories using suffering, sacrifice, jeopardy, and—yes!—sexual tension. Discover not only how but also where along your story’s structural arc to plant moments of moments of emotional poignancy. Explore your use of body language, gestures, and other emotional cues on the page, and drill down into how to make unlikable, inscrutable, or non-emotive characters resonate with readers. You’ll walk away with dozens of tips for revising your work, from prose to scenes to plot, with an eye toward delivering emotionally irresistible fiction.
Expand! Contract!: The Dance of the Well-Paced Story
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
A well-paced story takes the reader on a journey over peaks and valleys of tension and emotional complexity. In this workshop, you’ll learn strategies for maximizing dramatic effect through narrative expansion and contraction. In this workshop, Angie will present lots of examples illustrating narrative expansion (giving story moments more real estate on the page), which heightens both internal and external turning points, creates high emotional moments, and freezes poignant moments in time for maximum emotional effect. They will also present examples of contraction (giving story moments less real estate on the page), which allows writers to skip over moments of low tension (like boring backstory, useless “walking the dog” choreography, and effusive dialogue), set dramatic hooks at the beginning of chapters, and deliver dramatic punches at the ends of chapters. Their hope is to demonstrate that expansion and contraction are complementary tools in the writer’s toolbox that can be used together to help the writer draft the best possible version of his or her story.
Genres, Tropes, and Word Counts: Knowing What You Write, Who It’s For, and How to Deliver the Goods
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Building a career as a fiction writer is just like building a career in any other field: success comes with knowing your customers and delivering a product or experience that exceeds their expectations and keeps them coming back for more. So how do you begin? In this class, we’ll define top-level fiction categories (commercial, upmarket, literary), and then drill down to dozens of genres and subgenres. Why do these labels exist? Does your book really have to fit into a neat little box? What about cross-genre novels or those breakout genre-busters that defy all categorization? Next we’ll examine tropes—familiar character types, settings, situations, and storylines—and talk about how to use them to attract readers without lapsing into cliché or derivation. Finally, we’ll look at target word counts for each major genre. How long should your manuscript be, and why does word count matter so much to agents, editors, publishers, librarians, and booksellers? Whether you’re seeking a traditional publishing deal or planning to publish independently, knowing how to talk about where your work sits on the vast literary landscape will not only help you find readers, it will help readers find you.
Heroes, Henchmen, and Sidekicks: The Characters-First Approach to Plot
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Following an unconventional approach to plotting—creating vibrant characters first!—attendees will cast all the major roles in a novel of any genre, and then allow whatever plots pop up to develop organically. Then we’ll give each character light touches of backstory and inner conflict. Next, we’ll add in some interpersonal conflicts and contradictory motivations. Finally, we’ll define crucibles (situations that force characters to stick together despite conflicts), throw our characters in one, and see what stories come out. This is a fun, hands-on workshop that will help writers generate new ideas or get unstuck with a current project. It’s surprising to see how story arcs, themes, and scenes develop when you start thinking about characters first.
How and Why to Audit Your Royalty Statements
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Short Description: Understanding book accounting is one of the most important things pro writers can do to advocate for themselves. Come learn how to read your royalty statements—and, more importantly, how to spot common errors that could mean more money in your pocket! With samples from publishers big and small, we’ll dive into escalators; reserves and returns; retail versus net income; high discounts; subrights and bonus income; and more.
Long Description: Most professional writers don’t do much more than glance at their royalty statements before filing them away. But when authors know what all the numbers mean, where they all come from, and how the final balance (whether unearned or royalties due) is arrived at, many are shocked to discover that royalty statements are a veritable mine field of common accounting errors and missing information…and unpaid earnings. In one to two hours, I can cover two important things: (1) what information all royalty statements should contain, and (2) the most common errors that get made and that are relatively easy to spot.
High Concept Explained
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
If you’ve heard agents and editors beg writers for high-concept stories but you’re not really sure what that means, or if you’ve received rejections that describe your story as “too quiet” and you’re not really sure what that means either, then this workshop is for you. Come find out once and for all what high-concept fiction is all about and why it rises to the top of the slush pile.
Line Editing 101
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Line editing is just one of many types of editing that a manuscript goes through on its way to becoming a published book. Whether you’re interested in line editing for yourself or others, this hands-on class will train your editorial eye to see opportunities to tighten up flabby prose, clarify intended meaning, abolish clichés, enhance personal writing style, and more.
MFA in Half a Day
Focus: Craft
Duration: 2-4 hours
Writers tend to think that artful prose belongs solely to the realm of literary fiction—that writers of genre fiction need only concern themselves with matters of story craft, such as plot, structure, character arc, pacing, and so on. Not true! For agents, a great disappointment is a manuscript that scores high on all the elements of story craft but falls flat in narrative style. This class is all about what genre writers can learn from their literary cousins. Come prepared to write! Learn various poetic and literary devices and practice applying them to your prose, from simple sentences to complex scenes. How can description be used to make meaning? How can voice be used to support theme? And, most importantly, how can you develop a personal writing style that leaves a lasting impression on your reader?
Opening Pages That Lead to Yes
Focus: Craft, business
Duration: 1-3 hours
If your query letter or in-person pitch got you a request for sample pages, but your sample pages didn’t get you a request for a full manuscript, what went wrong? In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore what agents are looking for in your opening pages and how to craft evocative beginnings that get your full manuscript read. You’ll learn:
- The importance of establishing character, setting, and voice on page one
- How your opening image or scene should relate to your story’s overall structure
- How to introduce story questions that entice rather than confuse the reader
- How to recognize and avoid cliché openings
- What starting in medias res really means—and, more importantly, what it doesn’t mean.
For the three-hour version: Bring the first three pages* of your novel or novel-in-progress. (Memoir is fine, but no scripts or nonfiction projects, please.) Time and number of attendees permitting, we’ll discuss our works-in-progress and help each other brainstorm various possible entry points in relation to each work’s overall story structure. Come learn how to turn those sample requests into requests for full manuscripts! *Double spaced, one-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman
Principles of Information Design
Focus: Business
Duration: 1 hour
Maximize the visual appeal of your author newsletter, website, business card, and other marketing materials. Learn to identify and avoid ten poor design choices many non-pro designers make (from centering body text and using fancy, unreadable fonts to including too many colors and neglecting white space) and make your marketing materials look like you spent a fortune on graphic-design services.
Query Letter Bootcamp
Focus: Business
Duration: 1-4 hours
Whether you’re hoping to get a literary agent or to place your book directly with a publisher, a query letter is your most important sales tool. But writing a good query letter can be more difficult than writing a whole manuscript. How do you distill the essence of your novel or memoir into a couple of pithy pitch paragraphs? Come find out! This course opens with an introduction to the query letter and where it fits within the scope of the entire publishing process. From there, we’ll move into some important things you should do before you query. I’ll show you all the common mistakes writers make in their query letters and why so few query letters lead to requests for sample pages or full manuscripts. I’ll walk you through how to write a standout four-part query letter, and we’ll spend a lot of time breaking down the pitch, which is the most important part. Finally, I’ll give you some strategies for setting up a query system. I’ll let you know what to expect, how (and when) to respond, and what to do when multiple offers start rolling in. Are you ready get that novel or memoir published? Let’s get started!
Snapping Pictures with Words: The Art of Description
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-3 hours
With plenty of writing time in the two- and three-hour versions of this course, we’ll cover (a) the role of description in fiction, (b) the differences between active and passive description, and concrete and abstract description, and (c) the importance of choosing what to describe and when. In Latin, DESCRIBE means moving away from or out of writing. Seems counterintuitive, right? Well, in this workshop, we’ll learn to craft descriptive passages so evocative that the images leap right off the page and into the reader’s imagination. Lecture will focus on the following:
- The role of description in fiction
- The role of description in “show don’t tell”
- Deciding what (and what not) to describe
- Deciding how much description is too much (or not enough)
- The difference between active and passive description
- Concrete/external description (of people, places, and things)
- Abstract/internal description (of themes, relationships, emotions, motivations, reactions, ideas, and thoughts)
The Dotted Line: Contracts Demystified
Focus: Business
Duration: 1-2 hours
Writers are often so very excited to be offered a contract—any contract!—that they don’t stop to think about whether it’s a bad contract that could quite literally ruin their future writing career. This class exists to help authors know their rights and understand typical publishing contracts. Learn all about the grant of rights and territories; reserved rights; the exploitation of subsidiary rights; advance payouts, royalty rates, and accounting clauses; warranties and indemnities; option clauses and noncompete clauses; and more!
The Loaded Exchange: Writing Tension-Packed Dialogue
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
What affects how your characters speak to each other, what they say, and what they hold back? Learn to let your scene’s context, subtext, and inherent conflict guide you in writing great dialogue.
Theme: What It Is and Why You Need It
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
What is theme, why does your story need it, and how can you go about developing it? Working from a list of more than 100 thematic pairs, we’ll shoot straight to the heart of your characters’ core beliefs and values, and practice mapping their internal story arcs. Then we’ll learn strategies for plotting, revising, and strengthening scene craft with an eye toward developing meaningful thematic takeaways.
Thinking in Scenes: Projecting Your Fiction on Your Reader’s Mental Movie Screen
Focus: Craft
Duration: 2-4 hours
In this class, you’ll move toward creating more cinematic, visual stories by learning to think in scenes. We’ll start with the basics of scene, including how scenes on screen are similar to and different from scenes in a novel. We’ll talk about scene and sequel, and how to use it to create perpetual plot motion. Then we’ll move on to using scene to maximize conflict and tension on the page. After a writing exercise or two and a look at several examples, time permitting, we’ll work together as a class to build a story together using our new “thinking in scene” skills. Attendees will walk away with worksheets that will help them put new scene craft skills to work for them at home.
Traditional Publishing in 16 Easy Steps
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Based on my book Do You Need a Literary Agent?: The Writer-in-the-Know Guide to a Literary Agent’s Role in the Publishing Industry, this class will give you a complete, step-by-step overview of the traditional publishing process, from the moment you have an idea for a novel to the day you get your rights back from the publisher. Special emphasis on an agent’s role during each step.
Two Kinds of Worldbuilding (and Why You Need Both)
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1 hour
Did you know that there are two different kinds of worldbuilding, that they’re done two different ways, that they perform two different functions in your story, and that you need both? Come find out which one your story might be missing!
Verbs, Verbs, Verbs
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1 hour
Want to punch up dull prose, tighten flabby sentences, and transform passive voice into active? Verbs are the key! We’ll start by reviewing the verb basics that are most germane to creative writers (tense, gerunds, and participles). Then I’ll give you six verb-focused tips for revising listless sentences, and we’ll do a little practice as a group. Finally, we’ll review a narrative analysis of several bestselling authors’ work to see how the pros use verbs to craft unputdownable prose.
Writing the Ensemble Cast
Focus: Craft
Duration: 3-4 hours
Whether you want to create a dynamite supporting cast for your central character or write a story or series with multiple protagonists, this class is for you. Using a unique, comprehensive grid of archetypes, dramatic roles, and personality types, we’ll analyze more than twenty blockbusters that feature unforgettable ensemble casts. Come learn how to master multiple characters’ arcs, webs, timelines, and points-of-view.
Your Character Before Page One
Focus: Craft
Duration: 1-2 hours
Writers are often told they should build an interesting backstory for their protagonist. But why, and how does that really help you plot or write your novel? This workshop is in four parts. First, identifying a formative event (some story experts refer to this formative event as the “ghost” or the “wound”) that happened in your character’s life before page one of your novel. Second, mapping how that event caused (and then, over time, reinforced) a misbelief for your character—something like “all men eventually leave” or “I’ll never live up to my mother’s expectations.” Third, making this misbelief the internal conflict arc in your novel by plotting out story events that challenge this misbelief and make your character balk. And fourth, identifying the revelation—the moment when your external and internal arcs come together, and your character must shed his or her misbelief in order to move forward beyond “The End,” thereby demonstrating character development and growth.
Angie Hodapp 