Workshops with Ransom Stephens

Here are two upcoming workshops given by Redwood Writers member Ransom Stephens.

Tools of the writer and how to use them

To write stories that grab readers - whether fiction or memoir - you have to understand your tools: point of view and characterization, dialog and description, showing and telling, metaphor and simile, pacing and voice, backstory and flashback, repetition and opposition. We examine every tool and see where, why and how they can be put to work constructing great stories. Bring your story idea or manuscript and let's get to work!

Instructor: Ransom Stephens, Ph.D.

• Saturday, March 20, 10a-4pm, Sebastopol: Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Sign up with this form. $50 Non Member / $45 Member of Sebastopol Center for the Arts + $7 materials fee.

How to Give a Great Reading

You've just been invited to read at a literary event. Don't panic! Ransom Stephens has produced hundreds of readings and wants to prepare you. Choose the right piece for each venue and time allotted and discover your strengths as a storyteller so that you can enjoy this opportunity to develop your audience.

Instructor: Ransom Stephens, Ph.D.

• Saturday, April 3, 1p-4pm, Sebastopol: Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Sign up with this form. $30 Non Member / $25 Member of the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.

Memoir Workshop for Capitol City Young Writers

Here is another upcoming event that features two California Writers Club members and was organized by friend of Redwood Writers, Verna Dreisbach.

On Saturday, March 13th, aspiring young writers and avid readers, from grades 6 thru 12, will mingle with peers, published authors and book industry professionals featuring several guest speakers, followed by a writing workshop. This event will highlight the art of memoir. Guest authors include Patricia V. Davis and Linda Joy Myers.

MEET THE AUTHOR

PATRICIA V. DAVIS -

Harlot's Sauce: A Memoir of Food, Family, Love, Loss, and Greece, is an award winning finalist in the 'Multi-Cultural, Nonfiction' Category of the National Best Book Awards 2008, sponsored by USABookNews.

Patricia’s essays, opinion articles and celebrity interviews have appeared in various newspapers and magazines nationally and internationally. She is the author of published poems on women's issues, including,“If This Woman is Being Operated Recklessly” which appeared alongside Laurence Ferlinghetti's work in New Press magazine. Patricia is also the editor-in-chief of Harlots' Sauce Radio, non-partisan e-magazine and podcast at www.harlotssauce.com.

CAREER EXPLORATION LINDA JOY MYERS, PHD -

is a practicing therapist of thirty years in Berkeley, California. She has taught writing as a healing courses to her clients and has trained therapists in this method. She is President and Founder of the National Association of Memoir Writers and author of The Power of Memoir: Writing Your Healing Story.

WRITING WORKSHOP Led by, PATRICIA V. DAVIS

One of the tougher genres to write, memoir combines the truth of non-fiction with the craft of fiction. Not an autobiography, the memoir needs to be carefully considered and constructed. As a painter chooses his scenery, so must a memoirist choose their stories. From traditional to experimental, narrative to fragmented, a memoir has no single form, no specific guideline or method - memoir demands the writer create art. Discover the many forms of this genre, how to avoid the most common mistakes and where to begin. If you have a work in progress, please bring the first page to workshop.

Saturday, March 13, 2010 9am - Noon

Sacramento State University

Forest Suite, 2nd Floor

Student Union

Park in Structure II

For more information about the Capitol City Young Writers organization, please visit their website.

Upcoming Screenwriting Workshop

The Redwood branch of the California Writers Club will host a

Screenwriting Workshop

Saturday, March 27, 2010

10:00 am to 11:30 am

Petaluma Novak Center (the Senior Center )

211 Novak Drive

Petaluma, CA 94954

(707) 778-4399

On-site registration and check-in for those pre-registered begins at 9:45 am sharp. Cost for the workshop is as follows:

CWC Member Price: $10 Non-member Price: $15

The workshop will be facilitated by Charlotte Cook, President of KOMENAR Publishing, and Hollywood screenwriter Jon James Miller.

The workshop is entitled, Adapting Sideways--The Not-So-Straight-Forward Transition from Screenwriter to Novelist. The process of adapting a screenplay into a novel presents unique storytelling issues. Charlotte Cook and Jon James Miller have been working for a year to adapt one of his award-winning screenplays into a novel. The effort has produced a number of insights, strategies, and techniques for making the transformation. Though aimed at screenwriters, this facilitator pairing has plenty of advice for novelists who want to create novels that could be optioned for the screen. This has become a hot topic because the ‘spec market’ for screenplays has all but disappeared with conventional wisdom in Hollywood that “screenwriters should find a market for their material as a novel first.”

Please visit our website to download a copy of the registration form, fill it out, and mail it in to our P.O. Box with your check or money order, payable to 'Redwood Writers.'

About Charlotte Cook:

Charlotte Cook is president and story editor of KOMENAR Publishing as well as a popular presenter at writers’ conferences and events, and a successful teacher and workshop facilitator. www.fictionwriteideas.com

About Jon James Miller:

Jon James Miller earned a Bachelor of Science in Cinematography and worked for several years in cable documentaries for A&E, Lifetime and The History Channel while writing original feature length screenplays in LA. www.jonjamesmiller.com

Redwood Writers, P.O. Box 4687, Santa Rosa, CA 95402

Upcoming events by Patricia V. Davis

On February 12-14, the San Francisco Writers Conference will be held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in SF, and I will be speaking on Sunday, February 14, at 11-11:45 p.m. in a session titled, Bestseller! What You Need to Know for a Knock-Out Writing Career.

Lots of important information will be covered in this session, including working with retail booksellers, getting attendance at your events, how to blog to raise book sales, bad agents vs. good agents, behind the scenes facts about the industry that you must keep up with in order to make decisions about your career, and more.

Then in April, I will be teaching two separate courses for Marin Adult Education (www.marinlearn.com) They are:

I. Descriptive Writing That Your Readers Can ‘Taste’, ‘Smell’, ‘Feel’, and ‘Hear’ “Cerulean blue water and halcyon days”. “Eyes that sparkle like stars.” Yuck. No one can a picture a location or a character through these clichéd, meaningless phrases. A good writer helps readers truly visualize the setting and the characters they are describing. But portraying the place where our action happens, and depicting people in our story, all without falling into the “been here-done-that-and-it’s-all-so-boring”, is one of the most challenging components of writing. In this workshop, participants will read samples of descriptive writing that overcome the formulaic, and discuss what it is about them that creates a mind image for the reader. Then, with some simple but effective writing exercises, the class will leave armed with new techniques for crafting vivid word visuals of their own. Time and Place: April 6 and April 8, Tuesday and Thursday evening from 7-9 p.m. at Sir Francis drake High School (in classroom 308) Cost: $45.00 II. A Platform and a Blog: What, Why, Where, When, and How? New writers who are looking to publish their first work are told that they need a 'platform', and that an easy way to build one is to create a 'blog'. In this seminar for both aspiring and experienced writers we will discuss what exactly a ‘platform’ is, what a ‘blog’ is and why blogs are so valuable to writers who are seeking to either gain and/or widen their audience. You will learn where the best spots to blog are, when a writer should blog, and most importantly, HOW each individual writer’s blog should vary, meaning what the topics, lengths, frequency, etc., should be. Participants will leave this workshop with a working online blog in place, and concrete knowledge of how, in as little as two hours per week, we can build our platform and readership to help our book sales. Place and Time: April 20 and 22, Tuesday and Thursday 1 p.m.- 3 p.m. at Redwood High School Cost: $45 Hope to see some Redwood Writers at these events! Warm regards, Patricia

Patricia V. Davis
Editor-in-chief, HS Radio e-magazine
"Writing the Sauce of Life"

podcast: www.harlotssauce.com
website: www.patriciaVdavis.com

Article on Ransom Stephens in the San Francisco Chronicle

Ransom Stephens at the Redwood Writers 2009 Editing Workshops

Read the wonderful, in-depth book review and author profile about Ransom Stephens and his novel, God Patent, in the San Francisco Chronicle!

Ransom will be one of our presenters next Saturday at the second "Craft of Writing" workshop in the series.

Saturday, January 30, 2010 Create Tension
10:00-10:50 Overview: Examples of tension. Why is it important? How can we achieve tension?
Presenter: Ransom Stephens
11:10-12:30 Create tension workshop Brief review of tension and how to create.
Workshop/exercises on creating tension.
Presenter: Stefanie Freele

And Ransom will also be a presenter at the San Francisco Writers Conference in February.

Congratulations to an up and coming writer in our midst!

Kate Farrell

The Craft of Writing: A Series of Revision Workshops

The Craft of Writing:

A Series of Revision Workshops

Presented by the Redwood Branch of the California Writers Club

All workshops held at the Petaluma Senior Center, 211 Novak Drive, Petaluma 10:00 am to 12:30 pm.

Pre-registration is recommended.



January 23, 2010 - Write Tight(ly)
What is tight writing? Why is it important?
How can we achieve this? Examples.

Presenter: Jeanne Miller

Write Tight(ly) workshop
Brief review of tight writing and how to achieve it

Presenter: Jean Hegland

January 30, 2010 -Create Tension

Overview: Examples of tension. Why is it important?
How can we achieve tension?

Presenter: Ransom Stephens

Create Tension workshop
Brief review of tension and how to create it.
Workshop/exercises on creating tension.

Presenter:Stefanie Freele

Saturday, February 6, 2010 - End It Right
What is the right place to end? Not too soon or too late.
Why is this important? Examples of endings.

Presenter: Ana Manwaring

End It Right Workshop
Brief review of right places/ways to end a story.
Workshop/exercises on ending a story.

Presenter: Becca Lawton

You can register online via Paypal or you can print out a PDF form and mail it with a check.

The first 40 people to sign up for the complete series will also receive a copy of Make a Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld

Thank you to many of our local donors for their support of Sonoma County’s literary arts.

Redwood Writers, a branch of the California Writers Club, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

Donations for our workshop series are gratefully accepted at www.redwoodwriters.org - just scroll down and click on the ‘Donate’ button.

"writers helping writers"

Winter Women's Writing Workshop in Marin County

This announcement comes from Redwood Writers member Tomoko Harada Ferguson:



My Winter Women's Writing Workshop will run from January 11 - February 22. Six sessions: Monday evenings, 7 - 9:15 pm. No class, February 15. Location: Revolution 9 in downtown Fairfax (14 Bolinas Rd.) http://r9fairfax-com.doodlekit.com/home

Class will be limited to ten students.

Writing can be empowering, healing, reflective, fun. I believe writing shared in the Fall Writing Workshop was all of these things. So please join me again! Invite friends, too.

Let your writing blossom... In a supportive, nurturing environment you’ll be creative, discover your unique voice, and surprise yourself with your strong writing. Build a community of writers. Experience is not necessary. All levels welcome. Details at: http://writersblossom.wordpress.com/

Fee: $150 for 6 sessions. For new people who would like to try my class, pay $25 for the first night; no further obligations. To enroll, please e-mail or call me ASAP.

Thank you and I hope to see you soon!

Warm Regards,

Tomoko Ferguson

tomokoferguson at mac dot com
http://writersblossom.wordpress.com/