What's Your Story?

Students will learn:

1. The theory of creating structure within any creative endeavor.
2. The power of basic punctuation in setting a mood, creating a character, and enhancing dialogue.
3. The manner in which your narrator is the bedrock of your writing - and how to create a trustworthy voice in your writing.
4. The method of touching on the physical senses to heighten your reader's sense of engagement.
5. The evils of adverbs.  (Yeah, really.)
6. The pathway to finding your personal writing style.
7. The course from long format writing to novel writing.
8. The bedrock idea: Finding the "one thing" that will carry a story for you, and hopefully for your reader as well.
9. The way to understand your "IA or Ideal Audience."
10. The necessity of reading creative writing in order to produce creative writing.

During my sophomore year in high school, I was dropped into a writing course with a teacher who showed me the power of writing… and I was hooked.  I’ve written since that day, creating worlds of my own, and then seeing how my characters would react when exploring them all.  My first novel, Jury of Peers was well received - at one point achieving the number one ranking on Amazon with over 100,000 individual downloads.  Don't worry, it's not the required text.  The point is... I have an idea of how to stack words and make a few of them stick.

I have more than a decade of teaching experience, the majority of which was spent as an instructor in a lock-down rehabilitation facility for at-risk children (translated: gang kids who were struggling with substance abuse).  This allowed me to teach a wide variety of subjects, from second grade reading to college level physics, often in the same day in order to meet the needs of my students. 

My emphasis throughout was teamwork, discipline, leadership, and problem solving - as these form the braided cord that carries all through our lives.  My formal education is centered around a masters degree in elementary education, and another in special education - with a bachelors in philosophy and a minor in glass art... yes, that's right.  Glass.  Art.  My mother was thrilled when I told her about that one.

Homework will initially consist of a series of story starters that I will provide which will kickstart the creative process and then leave the learner to create in any direction that they like.  These will be used to get a feel for individual learning styles, each student's creative bent, and the manner in which a learner finds inspiration (humor, tragedy, or triumph).  Thereafter, we will create a story starter of our own, based upon our IA - "Ideal Audience" and our personal writing styles... and then launch into a long format piece of writing that will have the potential to span beyond the constraints of the class time, and into a first novel.  (It is during this time that we will plot the best course for each story if a learner is so inclined.)

Assessment will be ongoing - I prefer real-time feed back for students who are learning in a creative setting because positive feedback tends to spark ideas, and in a classroom setting there is often a geometric progression as creative people begin to brainstorm.  All assessment will be geared specifically toward helping students access their creativity and then inject it into their writing - not in the production of a letter grade.

55 minutes per week in class, and an estimated 2 - 4 hours per week outside of class.