Upcoming Las Dos Brujas Workshops ... and an invitation
Hi Everyone,
HAPPY NEW YEAR! I’m delighted to be back with a few workshop ideas for 2024—and I invite you to include your own suggestions in the comments section.
Although some offerings will be for paid subscribers only, the posts you’re used to receiving every week—as well as occasional guest workshops, etc.—will remain free and available to everyone.
Here we go:
PERFORMING YOUR WORK: At one point or another, many of us will be reading our work in public. To go from the privacy of our home and the page to facing a live audience can be daunting. Let’s discuss what works well aloud (not always your most lyrical passages), what’s too long, how dialogue can enliven a reading, and more. Practice aloud with us. Encouraging feedback included.
STRUCTURE: This isn’t the sexiest of topics but one of the most essential to grapple with—and especially at the following crucial juncture: after your messy first draft. How can we consider this unruly landscape and find the beginnings of order? How does periodically revisiting structure inform work as it progresses from draft to draft?
REVISION REDUX: This was a popular, hands on workshop I conducted last year and which I’d like to resurrect. Are you overwhelmed by the swamp that is the middle of your writing project? How do you find your way out? Tell us where you’re at and we’ll offer ideas for where your work might go. I promise you’ll leave more inspired than when you arrived.
Thanks so much for being a part of Las Dos Brujas community—and I look forward to hearing from you! Please consider becoming a paid subscriber in 2024, if you can.
Abrazos,
Cristina
www.cristinagarcianovelist.com
Now available in Spanish (MAPAS DIFUSOS) and as an audio book performed by a wonderful cast of actors!
Hi Cristina, are these workshops free to subscribers? Re the reading out loud/performing, I would be interested in sitting in on it. I am not writing fiction, so my performances will most often be for poetry and presentation of ideas.. There's always more to learn about standing in front of a group. Also regarding revision, I don't imagine your group has been working with poetry. No?
These all sound great! Thank you, Cristina! Structure is a constant weak point for me - and an area where I feel really uncertain of how to "test" my own attempts at structure. The structure of my first novel was the primary reason publishers cited for rejecting it (all 21-ish of them!), and the novella-ish thing I'm working on presently has different structural problems, but I don't know what they are well enough to correct them. Some of my favorite recent books (Sigrid Nunez's The Vulnerables, The Friend, and What are You Going Through?; Anne Enright's The Wren, The Wren) have structures I couldn't begin to try to replicate, and my attempt to try a novel with a Shakespearean five-act structure fell dead in the water around Act 2. So, I'd wholeheartedly welcome anything you can offer on structure!! And also on revision, and also on performing/ reading aloud :) Thank you so much :)