Instructor: Becky Martinez.           The First Pass

Once the story is finally finished, we’ll look at how to go back and start to make certain the story makes sense. We’ll look at ideas for finding problem areas and check to see if the pacing works or if there are slow periods where the reader might get bored. We’ll look for places to put in things that need to be explained or places to put red herrings in mysteries

           Getting rid of the Unneeded & Unnecessary

Now it’s time to start getting rid of those same words you use over and over. We’ll edit out over used adverbs and look for problem words.

              Making your story stronger

But editing is not all cutting. In these sessions we look at how to ADD stronger verbs or cut weak scenes or strengthen scenes to make them work better and to keep the story moving along.

           Polishing

Don’t let your story go out the door without one final look at the polishing process. We’ll look at reading through your story one final time to make certain it’s the best it can be. We’ll look at methods of polishing and making the opening pages and the ending the best they can possibly be.

 This class is part of a six class core curricula for beginning authors.  It maybe taken separately or you may register for all six classes at once for a savings of 10% on the course tuition.  Full course syllabus: Click Here  To register for all six classes at once and save 10% Click Here

Becky Martinez is an award-winning former broadcast journalist and published author. Her latest work, Shadows from the Past, is a gothic novella being published by The Wild Rose Press in early 2012. Her romantic suspense novel, Deadly Messages, was an Aspen Gold finalist and received 4 stars from RT Book Reviews. She has also had several romance novels and short stories published, including “Trouble in the Rockies,” which appeared in the anthology, The Trouble with Romance, a New Mexico Book Award finalist.   

She is one of the co-authors of Ten Steps to Creating Memorable Characters, a workbook for writers. For the past decade she has been writing full time and teaching online writing classes. She teaches in person workshops and has presented workshops at various conferences nationwide, including the national Romance Writers of America Convention, the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Convention and the Emerald City Writers Conference.