By integrating these 13 thinking, writing, and revising tips into their writing processes, participants will write tighter, more polished first drafts. They’ll improve their story’s pace, while ratcheting up suspense. These tips serve both as a checklist and a mandate. The tips relate to tightening a story’s structure, adding complexity to the plot, integrating backstory, enhancing character motivation, choosing words for sensual specificity, balancing narrative with action and dialogue, and improving both productivity and professionalism.

My book by this name (Writer’s Digest Books) has been an Amazon bestseller in its category for more than a year. 

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). This workshop helps you determine which structure will work best for your memoir: bookends, pyramid, reverse pyramid, or chronological narrative; decide what to include—and what is best left out; select examples and anecdotes that both support your points and maintain an engaging pace; and write dialogue that captures the emotional truth of the event and resonates with readers.

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.

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!