Synopsis
Once you have completed a story, you must relook your fiction with a keen editor’s eye if you are to identify aspects to rework and improve on. If you are unsure on how to troubleshoot and polish your work before you market it, this is the workshop for you.
First session (3-hours) 23 March 2023
How to be dispassionate when assessing and revising one’s own work
The different types/stages of editing: structural editing, copy/line editing, proofreading
How to identify and solve macro/structural problems (e.g. issues of concept, plot, character development, pacing, setting, themes, writing style)
How to identify copy/line issues (e.g. minor factual errors, consistency, grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity, expression, formatting)
How to give constructive and supportive feedback to other writers
At the end of this session, all participants will be broken up into small groups. Each group member will be given hard copies of the group’s sample texts to edit as homework.
Second session (4-hours) 30 March 2023
During this session, participants will gather in their allocated small groups to give mutual feedback on the texts they have edited.
While this small group critique process goes on, the facilitator will talk with individuals one at a time to give her feedback on their texts.
The session will end with a review of what participants have applied and gained through the entire workshop process.
Learning Outcomes:
-Understand the process of editing fiction
-Apply an editing mindset, when necessary, –to your personal writing
-Enhance how you give feedback to others -about their writing
Requirements:
In order to participate in this workshop, you will first need to submit a max-2000-word sample of your writing upon registration. (Each piece will undergo a review process by the facilitator and other participants such that you will learn how to critique text from an editor’s perspective and you will also receive comprehensive feedback on your own work.) SBC will get in touch upon full payment of the course to get your sample, latest a week before the workshop. Please contact us for any questions>
About trainer:
Verena Tay is a Singapore-based writer, editor, storyteller, theatre practitioner and arts educator. She has published two collections of short stories and four volumes of plays, as well as edited twelve story anthologies (including the bestselling BALIK KAMPUNG series published by Math Paper Press). An Honorary Fellow at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (Aug–Nov 2007), she was a Writer-in-Residence at Nanyang Technological University (Aug–Nov 2018). She has just completed a PhD in Creative Writing with Swansea University through which she wrote her first novel about three generations of Singaporean Chinese women with a mythological intervention.