Description
When we say, “tell me a story,” what we really mean is transport me to another place and time where something interesting—maybe even captivating—is happening, and we want to experience it right along with the characters. We want to get to know the characters—what they look like, their voices—through their actions and behavior. We want to be grounded in a place, at a particular time. It isn’t just in novels and short stories we want all this. Readers these days expect these storytelling qualities in our memoirs as well.
In this workshop, we’ll learn how to apply techniques good fiction writers use to shape their stories and reveal their characters. We use storytelling techniques from fiction—character, plot, setting, description, dialogue, and scene—because we want to create a world a reader can enter and experience fully. John Gardner calls this “a dream.” The elements and techniques of fiction enable us to create this dream, including the characters who live in it. Author Adair Lara wrote: “We want experience, not explanation.”
Judy Reeves is an award-winning writer and teacher whose books include A Writer’s Book of Days (named best nonfiction by the San Diego Book Awards and a “Hottest Books for Writers” by Writer’s Digest), Writing Alone/Writing Together and Wild Women, Wild Voices. Her memoir When Your Heart Says Go was released in 2023. Reeves’ work has also appeared in the San Diego Reader, Connotations Press, Serving House Journal, Waymark, Expressive Writing, Classroom and Community, and other journals and anthologies. A longtime teacher of creative writing, she previously taught at University of California San Diego Extension and has led community-based writing practice groups for 30 years. A faculty member of the Southern California Writers’ Conference, she teaches at writing conferences internationally and at San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit literary center she cofounded. She serves on the council for the International Association for Journal Writing.
