Mile-High MFA
Mile-High MFA in Action
Mile-High MFA in Action: How to Write a Great Novel
Join Mile-High MFA faculty mentor Rachel Weaver for a four-part series on fiction writing. In four 2.5-hour craft lessons, we will cover the fundamentals of great fiction: character and plot development, strong scene work, developing and maintaining tension, and revising in the most efficient way possible.
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Location: Arvada Center for the Arts & Humanities (arvadacenter.org)
Price: $65 per session / $200 when you sign up for all 4
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Fill out the registration form and pay for each individual session below its description. If paying for all 4 use the bottom Paypal link at the bottom of the descriptions.
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Monday Nov 5, 6:00-8:30pm
Building A Strong Foundation for A Novel
Without a strong foundation, your book will run into a ton of problems down the road. In this class, we will discuss the ways to create or shore up a foundation on which to build a story that doesn’t leak or sway with the wind. We will discuss what makes a compelling character, how to effectively establish your characters’ motivations, what sorts of obstacles create tension, and how to set the stakes for your character so that a reader will be pulled in most effectively.
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Click buy now to pay for individual session.
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Monday Nov 12, 6:00-8:30
How to Write Stronger Scenes
Scene work is the backbone of any story. When your scene work is strong, your reader is pulled into the story and forgets everything else. In this class, you’ll bring in one of your scenes and reshape it according to a checklist of what makes great scene work, including effective control over the point of view; ways to open and close scenes smoothly; walking the tightrope between telling and showing; tying one scene to another to create a watertight plot; and what to do with that back story.
Click buy now to pay for individual session.
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Sunday Nov 18, 1-3:30
Tension and Conflict: How to Keep Your Readers on the Edge of Their Seats
High tension is probably the number one reason readers keep reading. If you can keep your reader on the edge of his or her seat by creating and maintaining tension in scene after scene, that reader will stay up way too late reading your book and tell all their friends to go out and buy it. In this class, we'll delve into the interplay of all the elements that raise tension and create conflict and explore how to craft your story to capitalize on each within every scene, as well as across your entire plot line.
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Click buy now to pay for individual session.
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Saturday Dec 1, 1:00-3:30
Revising Efficiently: Some Techniques to Save Time
You’ve been writing furiously for months (or years) and that glorious day comes when you write the last sentence. You’ve finished your first draft, you go out to celebrate, the next day comes and you begin to wonder, now what? Often what follows is many years of inefficient cutting and pasting, rewriting, moving around, and moving back. It’s easy to get caught up in addressing surface problems rather than evaluating the backbone of the story from a craft standpoint. In this class, we will discuss solid techniques to make your revisions as efficient and effective as possible.
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Click buy now to pay for individual session.
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Use this link to register for all four sessions
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INSTRUCTOR BIOGRAPHY
Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014, by IndieBound as an Indie Next List Pick, by Yoga Journal as one of their Top Five Suggested Summer Reads and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. Prior to earning her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, Rachel worked for the Forest Service in Alaska studying bears, raptors, and songbirds. She is on faculty at Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program and Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Gettysburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, Alaska Women Speak and Fly Fishing New England.
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