Edit Your Own Prose: The Art of Rewriting

You’ve written a first draft of your novel or your memoir. You know you need to rework it, but you’re stuck. It doesn’t quite work, but you are not sure why. Rewriting the opening over and over isn’t helping. So, what should you do?    

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to see your own work with an editor’s eye using tips, tricks, and hands-on exercises.

The workshop will focus on big-picture issues, including story line, character development, and genre expectations, and help you bring the story alive on the page through rhythm, effective dialogue, and language choices.

Through the course of the workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Spot common big-picture problems (info dumping, “as you know, Bob” explanations, insufficient conflict, misunderstanding genre conventions, etc.)
• Track character development (goals and motivation)
• See the advantages and pitfalls of different points of view
• Make the most out of dialogue
• Play with language and develop your imagination

This workshop is geared toward fiction and creative nonfiction book-length manuscripts.

By the end of the workshop, you’ll better understand what isn’t working in your manuscript and how to fix it, and, hopefully, have learned to love the rewriting process.  

Maria Schamis Turner is a freelance editor specializing in developmental editing and line editing for fiction and creative nonfiction. She is a founding editor and previous editor-in-chief and creative nonfiction editor of the literary magazine carte blanche. She worked for 10 years on literary projects for CBC Radio, including as an editor for Canada Writes. She was also the producer of the true-story storytelling series This Really Happened and has taught numerous workshops on storytelling, writing, and editing.