​In addition to his conference seminars, offerings for writing organizations, and the 12-month Fiction Fluency Program, Eric Witchey designs and delivers custom offerings for writing groups, critique groups, and individuals. For more information, click on the Contact tab at the top of this page and send him an email.
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Fiction Fluency 2024-2025

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The 2024-25 Program is FULL. For information or to be placed on the alternate list, email eric@ericwitchey.com.

Fiction Fluency is a 100-plus hour creative writing seminar series that demonstrates executable techniques based on how readers read rather than parroting directives to mimic what has already been written while expecting conformity with contradictory lists of “shoulds” and “musts” that never quite seem to combine into a powerful reading experience. The seminars are based on how readers internalize story and consequent methods of applying conscious learning to both the conscious and intuitive expression of story.

Class Size:
Maximum of 20 participants. Previous participants have priority.

Prerequisites:
None. Appropriate for any level of development. The seminar series often includes beginners, semi-professionals, professionals, and MFA graduates. The course design moves everyone forward regardless of experience.

Four-part Foundation:

1. Writing for readers means understanding how reading works.
2. Writers didn’t get new brains because we started writing fiction.
3. Narrative story is a complex extension of natural language.
4. Practicing language acquisition skills on dramatic elements creates improvement in the ability to express story (fluency).

Approach:

• Creative habits allow recognition, practice, and internalization of complex patterns that readers rely on to interpret dramatic stories.

Methodology:

• Isolate concept.
• Practice concept in isolation.
• Practice concept in combination.
• Practice concept at speed.
• Select new concept and repeat.
  • The seminars isolate and present concepts and demonstrate how they interact with one another. During seminars, real-time group application of concepts support recognition and control. Focused exercises between seminars reinforce the concepts explored during the seminars, combine those concepts in useful ways, encourage participants to practice at their desired tempo, and prepare them for a new set of concepts.

Intuition (but I’m a pantser):

• The more we know consciously, the more the subconscious (intuition) has to work with. Oral and text-based stories are a complex extension of natural language. The ability to produce intuitively can be enhanced by conscious awareness of effective patterns and techniques. Applying those concepts in speed practice trains the mind to deliver intuitively at pace.

Cognition (but I’m a plotter):

• Recognition of patterns allows isolation of problems and the ability to address those problems during design, composition, or revision. When intuition delivers a flawed draft, cognition allows analysis and solution. Alternatively, a full understanding of the interacting patterns that make up stories allows conscious design and development—should a writer choose to engage with their material that way.

Fiction Fluency Participants Receive

• 108 Zoom Contact Hours of Questions, Answers, Instruction, and Exercises—8 hours per weekend. 4 hours Saturday afternoon and 4 hours Sunday morning once each month. After each 4-hour session, an additional 30 minutes of Q&A for participants takes place.
• Periodic update and encouragement emails.
• Unlimited course-related Q&A by email for 12 months. With the permission of the person asking the questions, the instructor sometimes sends out files containing questions and answers that benefit all participants.
• Three volumes of Fiction Fluency textbooks, totaling 1500 pages of dense modules and exercises that support the coursework and beyond.
• An online bulletin board for discussion of WiPs, course content, books, and other creative pursuits.
• An invitation to ongoing, free productivity sessions that take place for four hours every Tues, Thurs, Sat, and Sun morning on Zoom. Open to all writers who agree to and support the rules of participation. Email for details. You work on your projects for your reasons. Come and go as you please.
• Access to a cohort of highly motivated, creative participants. Nobody in this space will ever say, “You think too much,” “Be serious,” or “Be practical.” You are, however, likely to hear “what if…” and “Oh, and then…”
• A massive reduction in interminable trial-and-error learning by inference.

Participants Do Not Receive

• A shortcut. Fiction Fluency will save thousands of hours over years, but participants get results in direct proportion to the work they do. Practice = Change.

Fiction Fluency Seminars for 2024-25

Award-winning writer Eric Witchey presents the 10th Fiction Fluency Seminar series from September 2024 to August 2025.
These seminars support the development of intuitive and cognitive writing skills by adding pattern recognition to conscious understanding and reinforcing the flow of emotion through the hands. The seminars also support conscious design of story and an understanding of the pervasive impact of character on all elements of story and reader experience.
Participants walk away with market-tested tools that function in any genre. These tools allow writers to precisely describe how existing stories function, to diagnose and solve problems in stories under development, and to design stories from scratch through intuitive discovery or conscious design.

Fiction Fluency seminars combine Mr. Witchey's practical experience selling fiction in 13 genres with linguistic and cognitive science research on how readers internalize story in heart and mind. The seminars present practicable, executable skills for creation, analysis, and revision of short stories and novels.

Series Overview

The 12-month series begins with an honest assessment of our writing goals and how to achieve results within the actual lives we live, including creation of custom, personalized day-to-day writing habits and the skills that allow us to begin again when our day-to-day habits break. The opening months include an introduction to the reader's neurophysiology and descriptions of their conscious and subconscious processes. All Fiction Fluency seminars show participants how to make use of those processes.
With a foundation of how readers read and personal creative practices, the seminars move into the management and manipulation of classic, dramatic scenes. Early sessions focus on elements of scene mechanics, demonstration of interactions of emotional contrasts at several layers, character creation, character roles from the reader’s perspective, and techniques that enhance the reader’s ability to bring scenes to life in heart and mind.

Dramatic scenes provide the foundation for explorations into controlling character change and using those changes to prove Dominant Themes, which results in participants understanding the difference between a complete flash fiction story and a single scene. From scenes and flash fiction, the seminars move into development of short fiction, novellas, single-POV novels, and then multiple-POV and/or multiple-timeline novels. The end of the seminar series focuses on revision, polish, and sales.

Months 1-3: Creativity and Emotionally Transformative Fiction

The Three-Month and Twelve-Month Block Price Options Begin Here
If you have not been exposed to this program before, we strongly recommend beginning with the three- or twelve-month options. The foundations of the program in the first three months are necessary for taking full advantage of the nine following months.
​The first three seminars of Fiction Fluency introduce participants to the foundational linguistic and cognitive science underlying reading, creative practices, and methods of adapting the unique lives of each participant to their personal creative pursuits. This foundation explores theory, practical application, techniques, and methods that allow participants to develop solid creative practices and incorporate them into a personal lifestyle that supports their idea of success in writing fiction. Better yet, the opening months demonstrate how to begin again by building a new solid writing habit after an earlier habit falls apart, which it always does. These seminars also introduce a solid foundation for the development of emotion-driven, dramatic story acted out by believable characters.

Month 1: Foundations of Your Creative Life
14-15, September

How do we improve? How do we fit writing into our lives? What can we do when it all falls apart?

This seminar begins with simple principles that allow human beings to adapt to tasks through practice. It then applies those principles to known and knowable foundations of learning, reading, storytelling, and creativity. Using those understandings, it supports individual identification of personal habits that increase the speed of learning and result in solid, practical foundations that support long-term creative gains. The seminar includes a summary component of story analysis methods that help establish solid habits whether a writer writes alone or with the support of a writing or critique group. Attendees walk away with a program customized for their lives. Better yet, they understand the principles that allow them to redefine their program in response to changes in their lives and personal development.

Month 2: Creating and Finding Time
12-13, October

What is creativity? How do we create? What do we do when the muse has abandoned us?

Create is a verb. We all stall. We all get stuck. We all hit walls or resistance when we start, fix, revise, or finish. This seminar shows how to take control of personal creative processes. The seminar begins by examining target-, random-, intuition-, and process-driven creativity. Given those four creative modes and the reality that they interact with one another constantly, the seminar demonstrates and experiments with the nature of personal tools and how to create them. The seminar demonstrates the creation of personal creativity tools, their evaluation, and how to revise them as circumstances change. After all, in the long-term a writer must be able to create and modify their own tools. To be called a tool in these seminars, a technique must be useful:

• Describing published stories,
• Analyzing stories during development,
• Diagnosing problems and suggesting solutions, and
• Designing new material.

Month 3: Writing, Reading, and Internalized Story
16-17, November

I love my story, so why don’t readers like it? How is reading different than writing?

If you have pushed your best dramatic truth through a pen or keyboard and been underwhelmed by the reader's response, this seminar can help. Writing and reading experiences manifest from two different processes in the reader’s heart/mind. Understanding both and how they overlap lets writers take aim on the hearts of their readers. This seminar builds an understanding of the cognitive and emotional differences between reading and writing. It examines the internal mechanisms of these two unique ways of perceiving and understanding text before shifting to an introduction to Vertical and Horizontal Story elements and how they influence the development of the story the reader builds from the emotional/psychological queues the writer places in the text. This session includes discussions and exercises that reveal the psychological power underlying famous, viral stories. It introduces executable planning and analysis concepts that support the development of new and improved craft skills for any writer at any level.

The Three-Month Block Price Option Ends Here

Months 4-7: Step-by-Step Building Blocks of Dramatic Scenes

The Nine-Month Block Price Option Begins Here

After three months of developing reader awareness, creativity skills, and personal habits that support long-term gains as writers, the Fiction Fluency program moves into demonstration of core developmental tools and patterns for producing stories that have strong emotional impact on readers.

Month 4: Overview of Characterization in Dramatic Scenes
14-15, December

What makes a scene? Whose scene is it? Why scenes at all?

We have all written strong short pieces then looked at them and wondered if we wrote a story or just a scene. This seminar begins an exploration of dramatic scenes as the practical building block of all stories. The seminar touches on deep character psychology and how that knowledge influences the power of layered scenes that combine three types of character desire with static setting, dynamic setting, and interactive setting. Exercises include group creation of a dramatic scene by applying two emotion-specific tools in a way that allows participants to deconstruct and reconstruct scenes in their own work.

Month 5: Deeper Character Development and Conflict Sets
18-19, January

Why doesn’t my family like this scene? Why did every reader stop?

How do I make them believe and feel the changes in character?
This seminar examines Vertical and Horizontal Story (introduced in Month 3) in more depth and explores the interactions of character agenda opposition (conflict sets) and how those reinforce one another inside a scene. Exercises demonstrate how to design, discover, or exploit conflict by understanding and evaluating text through Person vs. Person, Person vs. Self, and Person vs. Environment lenses. Participants continue to examine characters and their relationships to risk, stakes, and consequence. EPST and ED ACE are applied to analysis and revision. This seminar also includes application of various techniques for exploration of character, including an introduction to Indirect Dialog that implies coherent subtext.

Month 6: Character Definition and Impact on In-scene Tactics
15-16, February

Why did she do that? What should she have done? Who cares and why? Can I cut this? Should I?

Our characters reveal differences through their choices. If they don’t, psychologically they seem like one character to the reader and to editors. This seminar explores how characters interact moment-to-moment when faced with mutually exclusive agendas on a choice-by-choice level. The seminar includes development of characters with personal history, unique psychology, unique physiology, and well-developed desires that change as circumstances change. The seminar combines emotional contrasts with changes in emotional/psychological states that drive decisions and tactics. This includes application character emotional states to creation of Indirect Dialog in more detail than in the previous seminar. The seminar includes a close look at tactic changes in dialog and how contrasting those changes between characters can allow reader understanding that goes beyond the spoken lines alone (subtext). Exercises include demonstration of emotion-based tools in production and revision of new tactic groups in narrative and dialog.

Month 7: Character Influence and Line-by-Line Emotional Contrasts
15-16, March
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Why do my readers put it down when I know the scenes prove the character change and the conflicts fit story and character? What did I do wrong? What do they want from me?

The crit group said it was "slow through here" or "she wasn't a sympathetic character." Even the description of drying paint can be made powerful in the mind/heart of the reader once you understand what the reader needs. All human perception relies on recognition of contrasts: figure/ground, hotter/colder, brighter/darker, higher/lower, better/worse, etc. This seminar demonstrates how our perception mechanisms translate words on a page into recognizable emotional contrasts. Then, the demonstrations and exercises give participants the ability to recognize, design, analyze, and exploit opposing energies (dialectic pairs) by understanding the character who experiences those energies. Exercises in very short narrative description and dialog include use of the ED ACE tool, the Because, Because technique, manipulation of implication, and management of reader projection. This seminar ends with a full review of all the aspects of scene development that have been explored in seminars 4-7.

Months 8-9: Building Short Stories

Every skill we apply in short stories we must also apply in novels. Of course, novels require more skills. However, short stories let writers learn faster, test technique more quickly, and build reputation. The previous seminars established creative habits, developed an understanding of how readers create stories in their hearts and minds from little black squiggles, built up a repertoire of scene elements that can be combined in an infinite number of ways limited only by our own creativity, and demonstrated techniques for building full, dramatic scenes that support the creation of larger works. Months 8 and 9 stack up those building blocks in different configurations to create actual stories.

Month 8: Flash Fiction Control for Character-Driven Story
12-13, April
Is it a scene or a story? Can it be a story? What’s the difference? What do I have to do to make it a story?

Dramatic stories differ from scenes, essays, poetry, or articles in important ways. This seminar introduces Control Statements as tools for designing, testing, and revising flash fiction between 500 and 1000 words. The seminar includes a review of the first four layers of Vertical Story Elements and methods of discovering character from text and application of character to text. Stories developed during the seminar consist of narrative Dialectic Pairs that create Tactic Groups, that then create Conflict Sets, that in turn combine with setting to create a Dramatic Scene. Application of Control Statements to support revision allows creation of a satisfying feeling of completeness in the reader by providing climax and resolution that proves thematic meaning. Exercises include exploration of character relative to theme and translation of the character/theme relationship into agendas executed and resolved on the narrative stage. Seminar participants walk away able to apply these tools and techniques to describe existing works and to develop their own stories.

Month 9: Character in Top-Down and Bottom-Up Short Story Development
17-18, May

How is a multi-scene short story different from a flash piece? Where does it start? How do we start it? Having started, what’s next? How does it end? What’s in the middle? How do I untangle the muddle in the middle? Why create short stories at all if we want to write novels?

This seminar answers these and other questions by beginning with a review of Vertical and Horizontal Story elements. Intuitive discovery and design process for character and story are discussed and demonstrated. Participants will learn a technique combining both and then prototype story for experimentation with scenes before full production of stories of 3-7 scenes begins. Several time saving metadescription techniques for story development are introduced, including all four Fiction Fluence Control Statements. This seminar continues exploration of character depth and the interaction of cognitive and intuitive creative work.

Months 10-12: Novels, Characters, and Themes

Everything we do in a short story, we also do in novellas and novels, but there's more to do in a long form. Months 10-12 focus on novels even though we have been working on novel-applicable skills from the beginning. Now, the seminars focus on character, theme, and prototyping specific to the creation of and revision of novellas and novels. Seminars 11-12 begin with tools and techniques for developing powerful stories that have one Main Character who is also the only Point of View (POV) character. Once understanding of a single-POV novel is established, lecture and exercises explore multiple-POV and parallel story development. Analyses of existing viral novels are presented. Participants use prototyping tools to discover, design, develop, or revise their own longer works.

Month 10: Longer Works and Revision
14-15, June

Are novellas and novels just long short stories? What is the same? What is different? Should I write long, short, or both?

This seminar examines planning and revision techniques for novellas, and novels by combining all previous seminar tools and techniques to design stories containing multiple Scene Sequences and, perhaps, Movements. By presenting existing novels and in-process novels along with demonstrations of techniques for revision based on intended or discovered themes, characters, and conflicts, the seminar demonstrates how to make choices regarding voice, tone, distance, and subjectivity both prior to composition and during revisions. The ripple-effect of changes in longer works and shorthand techniques for managing ripple effects are demonstrated. The techniques presented in month 10 support solution of problems in longer works so participants can avoid spending hundreds of hours in potentially counter-productive trial-and-error revision.

Month 11: Novels with Parallel Stories, Multiple-POVs, and Multiple Timelines
12-13, July

Can my story have more POV characters? How can I have different timelines? Does my novel tell more than one story? How can I manage multiple-POV, multiple-timeline novel development?

This seminar explores the relationship between character depth, Dominant Themes, and Dramatic Premises. The seminar includes a review of Vertical and Horizontal Story elements, and it connects those elements to character transformation and the ultimate proof of Dominant Themes. Prototyping exercises demonstrate management of story elements relative to one another for single-POV and multiple-POV novellas or novels with additional attention paid to interactions between the POV threads and management of timelines and off-stage characters. Participants will examine analyses of existing stories and prototype new material. If time permits, the group will add developed Anchor Scenes to the prototype.

Month 12: Polish and Publish
16-17, August

How do I know which changes to sentences, phrases, and words will improve the reading experience? How many times should I polish the prose? What’s most important when polishing? How do I know I’m done? When I’m done crafting, how do I sell the result?

This seminar reviews the definition of “Dramatically Complete” and revisits many previous concepts from the perspective of creating emotional impact after the judging the overall story Dramatically Complete. The final Fiction Fluency seminar focuses on revision processes using Control Statements, Reader Acquisition Patterns, ED ACE, re-visioning, found symbols, exploitation of refrains, screen tests, false scenes, extreme character testing, and management of levers, ratchets, buttons, and motifs. This seminar focuses almost entirely on top-down analysis and revision processes. It demonstrates efficiencies based on understanding the difference between dramatically complete and “emotional best form.” The end of the seminar includes a discussion of markets and various approaches to them.

2024-2025 Seminar Dates

14-15, September
12-13, October
16-17, November
14-15, December. 9-month program begins.
18-19, January
15-16, February
15-16, March
12-13, April
17-18, May
14-15, June
12-13, July
16-17, August


Pricing Options

• Full 12-month program: $1989.00 USD
• First 3 months, only: $497.25
• Nine months, starting in December: $1491.75

Important: Before committing to this experience, be sure you have read the above program description then use the email link below to send an email describing your writing experience and what you hope to get out of the year. It's informal. It's not a test. It doesn't matter if you have formal training or not. The email allows planning, coordination of payments with participant names, and communication prior to the class. 
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Payment Plans:

• Through PayPal by using a credit card.
• Direct Credit Card via the Credit Card button below.

• Or, by arrangement.

Pay by check or PayPal. PayPal allows for credit card or payment plans.
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Select your program from the drop-down window below.

To Participate, Ask Questions, or Raise Concerns: eric@ericwitchey.com