Best Beginnings: Keep Editors Reading With Compelling First Pages | 14 Nov 2021

Editors and agents make critical decisions about you and your prose based on the first page of your work. Some even decide whether to decline your work or keep reading based on the first page alone. So how do you write compelling first pages that grab and maintain editors’ interest?

During this webinar, Ashley and Melissa will discuss the craft of writing first pages, including common mistakes they see in the submissions pile, and do a live evaluation of attendees’ first pages to demonstrate how craft works and how editors read.

Breaking the Rules: Writing Prose Outside the Traditional Norms | 12 Dec 2021

If we’re writing in English, we’ve all heard many of the same “rules” about storytelling: Stories should be plot-driven. Stories should be character-driven. Conflict drives plot. Maybe we’ve even noticed that our own writing is following these “rules,” even though we’re dying to break them.

What if we could tell the story of a failed relationship through photographs? Or use a postpartum depression questionnaire to structure the first chapter of our novel? What if we could drop a modern-day character into a historical situation and let them run wild? What if we could retell the Bible’s biggest moments through the lens of a failed family holiday?

This webinar aims to get writers excited about the many ways their writing can break the rules, subvert norms, and have something important to say.

Keeping Your New Year’s Writing Resolutions | 5 Jan 2022

It’s the end of 2021. Another year of writing. And not just that: Another year of writing during a pandemic that’s often isolated us from the people and experiences that inspire us to tell stories.

We’ve made so many promises to ourselves about our writing, and we’re going to keep them in the new year.

We can find inspiration and focus on our writing in ways we’ve never quite managed before. This webinar will be a kickstart to motivate and inspire our writing practices in 2022.

Details

All of our webinars are held on Crowdcast, so you can attend live or watch the recording afterwards if the time of the live webinar doesn’t work for you. We believe in accessibility, so we make all of our webinars available on a sliding scale. By purchasing entry to our webinars, you are directly supporting hard-working writers and artists. All of the proceeds from these webinars go directly to paying the authors, poets, and artists that we publish in SAND, and we greatly appreciate your support.