PLEASE NOTE: Fiction Fluency with Eric Witchey is a 12-month program that is split into two modules, a 3-month Fundamentals Series, and a 9-month Mastery Series. One can take the Fundamentals or Mastery Series separately, or take both (best value) for a full year of scaffolded training. Seminars cannot be taken individually outside of these two series, as each seminar builds on the previous. You are currently viewing the Fundamentals Series. To learn more about the Mastery Series click here. For a full program overview click here.
Fiction Fluency Fundamentals: Creativity and Emotionally Transformative Fiction
The three-seminar Fiction Fluency Fundamental group introduces participants to the foundational linguistic and cognitive science underlying reading, creative practices, and methods of adapting the unique lives of each participant to their personal creative pursuits. This foundation explores theory, practical application, techniques, and methods that allow participants to develop solid creative practices and incorporate them into a personal lifestyle that supports their idea of success in writing fiction. It also provides solid foundations for the development of emotion-driven, dramatic story acted out by believable characters.
Seminar A: Foundations of Your Creative Life
September 9-10, 2023
Thinking about writing? Working hard at your writing and feel like you’re standing still? Let’s move forward. This seminar begins with simple principles that allow human beings to adapt to task through practice. It then applies those principles to known and knowable foundations of learning, reading, storytelling, and creativity. Using those understandings, it supports individual identification of personal habits that increase the speed of learning and result in solid, practical foundations and support for long-term creative gains. The seminar will include a summary component of story analysis methods that will help establish solid habits no matter what kind of critique group writers attend. Attendees will walk away with a program customized for their lives. Better yet, they will understand the principles that will allow them to redefine their program in response to changes in their lives and personal development.
Seminar B: Ideas: Creating and Finding Them
October 7-8, 2023
Create is a verb. We all stall. We all get stuck. We all hit walls or resistance when we start, fix, revise, or finish. This seminar shows how to take control of your creative processes. This seminar begins by examining target-, random-, intuition-, and process-driven creativity. Given those four creative modes and the reality that they interact with one another constantly, the seminar will demonstrate and experiment with the nature of personal tools and how to create them. The seminar demonstrates the creation of personal creativity tools, their evaluation, and how to revise them as circumstances change because in the long-term a writer must be able to create and modify their own tools. To be called a tool in these seminars, a technique must be useful:
- Describing published stories,
- Analyzing stories under development,
- Diagnosing problems and suggesting solutions, and
- Designing new material.
Seminar C: Writing, Reading, and Internalized Story
November 4-5, 2023
If you have pushed your best truth through a pen and been underwhelmed by the reader’s response, this seminar can help. Writing and reading are two different processes in brain and heart. Understanding both lets writers take aim on the hearts of their readers. This seminar builds an understanding of the cognitive and emotional differences between reading and writing. It examines the internal mechanisms of these two unique ways of perceiving and understanding text. Once the difference is clear, it shifts to an introduction to vertical and horizontal story elements and how they influence the development of the story the reader builds from the emotional/psychological queues the writer places in the text. This session includes discussions and exercises that reveal the psychological power underlying famous, viral stories. It will introduce executable planning and analysis concepts that support the development of new and improved craft skills for any writer at any level.