You have a story to tell, an important story, your story. Getting that story down on paper is hard, though. We writers have to be good at so many different things, from coming up with worthy ideas to developing a twisty and clever plot, creating relatable characters, choosing intriguing settings, generating believable dialogue, and writing evocative prose—six crucial elements. With ChatGPT and other bots taking over the writing market, authors worry they’ll become irrelevant in the not-too-distant future. The answer isn’t to surrender to the doom and gloom predictions. On the contrary, it’s time to lean into your humanity, to do what artificial intelligence can’t. Based on Jane’s book, Beat the Bots: A Writer’s Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Age of AI, this webinar shows you how to harness your innate creativity because if you bring your creativity, your individuality, and your judgment to your work, you’ll out-write a chatbot all day long.

The stories that keep readers up all night share three key characters: they’re suspenseful, well-structured, and cleverly plotted. In this comprehensive overview, you’ll discover how to write tighter, more polished first drafts by focusing on the underpinnings of effective storytelling. Specifically, we’ll discuss how to:

1. Create spine-tingling suspense by escalating conflict and raising the stakes.

We’ll assess how to optimize the story-driving potential of four kinds of conflict: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual (and how best to combine them). On the face of it, conflicts would seem to be either external or internal. However, it is only when an external situation is perceived as a conflict that the story moves forward. People’s reactions to an incident, not the incident itself, generate a conflict. In other words, all conflicts are internal.

2. Choose the structure that’s best for your story.

Structure is an organizing principle that, once set, helps you develop your through-line plot or storyline and keeps you on track as you write. Different stories lend themselves to different structures, and there is no right or wrong decision. The only mistake you can make is having no structure at all. The two broad options are linear (also called chronological) and non-linear. We’ll also review three questions designed to help you decide which structure is best for your story, considering the timeline, scope, and theme

3. Integrate plot Twists, plot Reversals, and moments of heightened Danger (TRDs) using Jane’s Plotting Roadmap to help build suspense while controlling your story’s pace.

“Plot twists” is an umbrella term, referring to three specific plotting strategies guaranteed to captivate your readers with their I-can’t-wait-to-see-what-happens-next unpredictability.

• Plot Twists: something unexpected but not the opposite
• Plot Reversals: something unexpected and the opposite
• Moments of Heightened Danger: something that adds urgency and dread to the story.

When your plot Twists, plot Reversals, and moments of heightened Danger (TRDs) come at tactically sound moments, your story’s pace quickens, and your action becomes more focused.

Whether you like outlining or prefer a more organic approach to writing, Jane’s Plotting Roadmap can help you create a powerful framework for your story by ensuring you integrate captivating twists and turns (TRDs) at appropriate points in your story.

Making thoughtful, reader-focused decisions about suspense, structure, and plot helps ensure your story will resonate with readers—and those are the stories publishers want, and readers crave.

The stories that keep people on the edge of their seats and up all night, from family sagas to thrillers and from romances to sci fi, are filled with unexpected twists and turns. By integrating plot twists, plot reversals, and moments of heightened danger (TRDs) at tactically sound moments, your stories will captivate readers with their I-can’t-wait-to-see-what-happens-next unpredictability. When your plot twists come at the right moments, your pace will be quicker and the action more focused, and these are the nuanced, multifaceted stories that sell, and that find a devoted reader- or viewership.

Red Herrings Reimagined

One of the secrets of mystery writing success is creating complex and surprising plots, and one of the secrets of creating complex and surprising plots is a deliciously sneaky technique writers use to befuddle readers—red herrings. By using red herrings, the same way that a magician uses sleight of hand, you’ll be able to divert your readers’ attention from the actual to the illusionary; if done well, your readers will believe what they see—an irresistible way to draw them in and keep them on the edge of their seats.

On How to Use Your Characters’ Views of the World to Create Compelling and Twisty Plots

What one character perceives is often profoundly different from what another character perceives. I call this dichotomy a perception gap, and capitalizing on its potential to reveal meaningful information about your characters is a reliable way to develop believable characters and deliciously intriguing plots. In this workshop, you’ll discover how opinion, bias, attitude, and biology affect perception, and how that information can help you develop complex plots.

Jane’s article by this name appeared in Writer’s Digest magazine.

SciFi, speculative fiction, horror, fantasy, mysteries, horror, paranormal, feral, and romance…all successful genre fiction share these qualities: the plot is engaging; the characters are believable; and the narrative flows and draws readers into the story. This workshop will provide a detailed overview of the craft of writing commercially viable fiction.

By planning out your major plot points, adding unexpected twists, and interweaving subplots, you’ll do more than improve your novel’s pace and deepen your story—you’ll ensure your novel will sparkle with page-turning thrills. Implementing tactics used by Graham Greene, Lawrence Block, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, and Alfred Hitchcock can help you add can’t-put-it-down electricity to your writing—it’s all in the way you handle plotting. In this workshop. you’ll learn a practical approach to plotting and practice putting it to work.

On Adding Richness and Texture to Your Work

Metaphors are, according to Aristotle, a sign of genius. Certainly, they are more efficient and economical than ordinary language; they give maximum meaning with a minimum of words. In addition, metaphors are generous to readers by encouraging interpretation. In this workshop, we’ll put four approaches to creating metaphors to work—whether you write fiction, non-fiction, memoir, or poetry, you’ll develop rhetorically sound images that communicate emotion on a multi-layered level.

Laying out a logical framework participants can use to analyze writing from a rhetorical perspective enables them to objectively assess their own work. Considering how Socratic methodology, philosophy, and logic apply to today’s writing challenges by analyzing writing examples through a lens of semiotics, a field of critical theory developed specifically for the interpretation of popular culture and its symbols and signs, equips participants to understand the importance and use of tropes. Examples vary from fashion writing to travel essays and from literary and genre novels to blogs and websites. This workshop provides specific and tangible tools participants can use to assess their own and others’ writing–and to add rhetorical heft to their own work.

Considering the nature of truth and perception surrounding issues of racism and civil rights; religious freedom and assimilation; sex and promiscuity; and mainstreaming children with disabilities enables participants to develop the skills to persuade people that the truth you see as evident is correct, without coming across as pedantic, patronizing, or mawkish. How can concrete language and detail increase the depth of readers’ moral responses to your writing? Which underlying structure will best support your rhetorical position: bookends, progressive logic, a pyramid, an inverse pyramid, or a straight-out narrative challenge? How can you reveal emotion and attitude through incident? How can you disclose and/or argue unpopular or irreverent positions without lecturing or talking down to your readers? What’s the proper balance between information and passionate pleas for justice?

In this workshop, attendees see how the writers of three works in three different modes approached the challenge: a letter (Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”); an essay (Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon”), and a middle school mystery (Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery). In this workshop, participants discover strategies they can use in their own work, specific tactics to help hone their unique writers’ voices.

Ruth Rendell (aka Barbara Vine), known as the queen of mysteries, wrote, “My experience of reading the manuscripts of unpublished writers is not that they are badly written or unreal or silly or badly constructed, but that they are deadly boring. They are dull.”

You’ll discover how implementing tactics used by Graham Greene, John D. MacDonald, and Alfred Hitchcock can help you add can’t-put-it-down electricity to your writing—in any genre, from crime fiction to romance and from literary to spec fiction. You’ll practice proven tactics to add tension and thrills to your fiction, plays, and screenplays.

Literary agents report that the most common reason fiction doesn’t sell is that the characters aren’t relatable. If your readers don’t feel what characters feel, see what they see, and understand what they say, they won’t empathize, they won’t care what happens. Readers need to be with your characters, in that space, in that moment. As Chekov wrote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” We’ll move beyond the instruction of “show, don’t tell,” to see how, exactly, step-by-step, to achieve that goal.

On Writing Memoirs

A memoir is a themed slice of life (unlike an autobiography, which is a chronological accounting of your life). 

Using lecturettes and hands-on writing exercises, this workshop helps you home in on:

• Your mission, theme, and narrative question (an implied promise to the reader)
• Which overarching structure will best facilitate your story: linear, a chronological narrative, or nonlinear, using categories organized by theme
• Which examples and anecdotes support your points and help maintain an engaging pace

How to Tap Into Your Brain and Find New Ideas That Work

Creativity can be learned. This simple idea can change lives. Research-based and grounded with illuminating examples, participants will be inspired to excel. By considering the latest research on creativity—random access, contradictory message, and free association—attendees learn specific tactics to ignite their creative fire!

Jane discusses the nature of truth and perception, and how this paradox impacts the stories you want to tell. We’ll review three examples that showcase how other authors have handled this challenge as it relates to controversial topics (racism and civil rights: Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”; sex and promiscuity: Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon”; and mainstreaming children with disabilities: Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery). Applying these tactics to your own work will enable you to write with passion and clarity. You’ll be able to persuade people that the truth you see as evident is correct, without coming across as pedantic, patronizing, or mawkish.

Jane is an experienced instructional designer and curriculum developer, skilled at creating interactive, hands-on workshops that leave attendees awed!

She’s delighted to work with you to create content that your readers will love.