A week-long master class at Hedgebrook, a writing retreat center for women in Washington. 

Master Classes combine Hedgebrook's retreat experience with the unique opportunity to be in residence and study with a celebrated teacher on beautiful Whidbey Island.

Creative writing workshops are offered to women writers at all levels of experience. Participation in each class is limited to 6-8 writers, to ensure individual attention, and create an intimate, supportive writing community.

The Art of Time in Story

Storytelling is a type of time-telling, and time-taking, as well. To tell a story successfully, a writer must move her characters through time—establishing a pace, slowing when needed, taking a beat, speeding up, driving towards a climax, or quietly fading out—and she must do this in a way that is both compelling and appropriate to her particular narrative. And, too, storytelling takes time, and a writer must learn to be patient with her story, with her characters and with herself, often for unreasonably long periods of time. In this workshop, we will study narrative time in our own writing and in the writing of others. We will look at techniques used in the temporally demanding media of film and television, and see how these can help us manipulate tempo and pace on the page. At the same time, using meditation techniques, we will explore time in relation to our own experience of writing and experiment with ways of expanding our temporal repertoire, our ways of being writers in time.
 
This workshop is for prose writers, who are working on fiction, memoir or creative nonfiction. Participants should come with writing projects in progress, or well-formed ideas for a project to start while in residency. 

To register or for further details, please visit the Hedgebrook website.