Over the past year or so I’ve taken several online writing classes, mostly workshops from the RWA. They’re inexpensive, I’ve learned something from each of them, and some have been really good.
Last spring I took an excellent class–Edit the Life Back Into Your Story: Hands-On Techniques for Creating Emotional Impact, taught by Lynn Johnson.
You can guess from the title that the class covered how to revise scenes to add more emotional depth to them. The exercises involved reading other people’s scenes and identifying what emotions they portrayed and how they were portrayed, and then doing the same with our own scenes. I’ve been kind of a dunce about this sort of thing, so breaking it down into a step by step analysis was very useful. The scenes I revised during the class were much better for the effort, and I’m still trying to go over other people’s scenes on a regular basis because I found that very helpful.
She’ll be teaching the class again at Savvy Authors beginning Nov. 26.