Creative Writing: Workshop Your Writing

Students will receive and give feedback on their novels and screenplays as they write or edit. Students are welcome to bring a work-in-progress or one they have completed (finished writing) to receive feedback on. 

Types of Feedback Given -
Developmental - This sort of feedback focuses on your overall plot, who your characters are and do they behave in a believable way, and ideas for moving your story forward when you aren't sure what happens next. 
Structural - This sort of feedback focuses on the overall shape of your novel and how the characters, plot, and sub-plots fit together. If you are doing multiple-perspective - can the reader tell when you jump from one head to another? If you have flashbacks and dreams - is this clear to the reader that it isn't happening in the "real" time? 
Copy - This sort of feedback focuses on sentence structure, grammar, word meaning, word replacements. For screenplays, this will also include formatting feedback. 

Students will learn how to give constructive feedback and work as beta readers (a writing industry term for someone who reads your story and gives you feedback on it). They will read their classmates pages with an eye to improve the pages in the voice of the writer (not themselves). They are encouraged to ask questions to get the writer to think more in depth about their characters and story. They will offer suggestions for improvement and point out what is working. 

Students will learn how to receive constructive feedback: how to listen with an open but protected heart, how to consider people's feedback without automatically jumping to the defense of what they are talking about, what to do when you get opposing feedback, how to listen to your own gut instincts about the feedback, and how to apply the feedback to your work. 

Each Week - 
Students will post their pages in a Google Doc for feedback in the Padlet 48 hours before the class is scheduled to start (if it is a complete novel, I recommend posting the entire book; if it is a work in progress, post up to 5 pages per week for feedback). 
Prose - Document must be in proper novel manuscript format: easy to read font (such as, Times New Roman, Ariel, Courier New), 12 point font for size, one inch margins, new paragraphs will be indented (with "tab" key or set up in manuscript), no blank lines between paragraphs, and line spacing will be set to double space.
Screenplay - Document should be in proper screenplay format: Courier New 12 point font, one inch margins, single spaced, scene headings, action lines, dialogue cues, etc. Instructions for copying pages from screenwriting software to a google doc will be provided (regular copy/paste does not maintain the special formatting). 

All students will then give feedback on their classmates pages 48 hours to before class is scheduled to start. Please read and give feedback on one to five pages on each of your classmates google doc using the Comments function and suggesting changes in the text. *Students may read the feedback before class starts, but I recommend they NOT "accept" or "reject" all feedback before class because it is easy to forget what you want to ask questions about without the comments prompting you. 

The instructor will give feedback on two to five pages per week for each student; the amount given per week will depend on how much structural, developmental, and copy editing feedback is needed per page. 

In Class -
The students will share screen with their Google Doc pulled up. We will go over the feedback as a class and the student will have the opportunity to ask for clarification on any feedback they aren't clear on from myself and their classmates. The instructor and other students will also give suggestions on how to implement the feedback in the writer's voice. Example, feedback, I'm not sure who is saying what in this chunk of dialogue; suggestion, here are some dialogue tags (said, yelled, whispered, or action tags) that you could add to these lines of dialogue to make it clear who is saying what. 
*If the learner doesn't have any new writing to go over, they can use their time for writing and craft questions or a writing sprint (everyone pulls up a story they are working on in class and write). 

This is an ongoing class with students able to join and leave as they need to. Class will need at least two students for it to go that week. If there is less than two students several hours before class, class will be cancelled that week (and a refund issued). 

If a student forgets to post their document or new pages 48 hours before class, they are not guaranteed to receive feedback from the class, but they are still expected to give feedback to their classmates on their pages.