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Off Campus Writers' Workshop - OCWW

Steven Trumpeter - Radical Revision

  • November 15, 2018
  • 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Winnetka Community House., 620 Lincoln Ave., Winnetka, IL

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Revision should go much deeper than just polishing up our prose and correcting typos. In this session, we'll approach our manuscripts in ways that take us out of our comfort zones and discuss ways to energize our drafts and unlock their mysteries. We'll be looking for ways to catapult ourselves out of our common writing ruts. This will entail looking at different craft elements like structure, POV, setting, voice and character and applying them to our own work in ways that might completely change the nature of our stories. Do you always write in first person? Then we're going to look at how switching to 3rd is more than just a "find and replace" function. Struggling with a secondary character of a different gender? Let's take a scene from the story and write it from his or her headspace and see where that takes us. Does a story fizzle out at the end? We'll look at the building blocks of plot to see where our pain points might be.

This isn't a class where we'll take a decent first draft and tweak a few things to come away with a polished final draft. Instead, it's a class where we'll take a draft we're lukewarm about and break it wide open to try to find the hidden gems that will make the story sparkle. Please bring a short story or chapter, or writing sample to use for writing exercises.

Steve Trumpeter's fiction has appeared in Sycamore Review, Salamander, American Fiction, Hobart, Chicago Quarterly Review and others. He earned a degree in Fiction Writing from Northwestern University. When not toiling away at his own short stories or novel, he teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and hosts Fictlicious, a popular live lit show in Chicago.

9-9:30 Socializing 

9:30-12 Program


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