ONLINE It's Got a Beat and You Can Dance to It: Rhythm and Pacing
micro-workshop | Monday, June 12, 2023 | 6-9pm MT
Instructor: Heather Osborne
MEMBER PRICE: $60.00 (with member coupon AWCSM25)
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $80.00
Pacing and rhythm go hand in hand. When the action ramps up in a story, the sentences get shorter and choppier. When the pace slows down, longer sentences that linger on details are the way to go. In this three-hour workshop for beginning to intermediate writers, we’ll take a look at how to construct a scene that has a specific pace. We’ll discuss how to edit a scene to make its rhythm evoke the desired emotions in the readers. We’ll examine how to use dialogue and beats to vary pacing. And we’ll find the “golden moments” when a story slows to a crawl to focus on a life-changing moment for the characters. This workshop will use exercises and discussion, and will focus on sentence-level writing.
This is an interactive online class using the Zoom web platform.
Heather Osborne is the author of Songbroken. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and romance. She earned her doctorate of creative writing from the University of Calgary, and she is associate editor of the International Review of Science Fiction.