Wow with Your Choices!
A workshop to guide your work in progress toward your vision
Go straight to the replay.
Enter the joyful, freeing practice of guiding your writing from draft to polished vision.
Who is this for?
Do you want to explore
Patterns that hold works in progress back (encountered over two decades of editing) and
Prompts and exercises that get those works closer to our hearts’ and minds’ imaginings?
This workshop’s for you!
Bring a work in progress. We’ll
Talk about five ways making skillful choices transports us to our vision for our writing
Explore the universe of possibilities the tools of our trade offer and how we can narrow the options to create work readers savor
Use a worksheet to scan your work in progress for
Two additions that can enrich and embody
Three replacements that can instantly clarify
Three experiments to distinguish
And meet other writers so we can learn and grow together!
🗓🔥 Subscribe or buy a single workshop to attend and get the replay. An annual subscription for $45 gets you access to all three workshops already posted—Outline to New Heights, Go Deep Q&A, and Be Concise, all live workshops hosted in the next 12 months, and all course materials and exercises.
Or get a single workshop for $15: Smash the link below (Ko-Fi) and email me at hollystarley@substack.com for the Zoom link. (You can also email me if you want to attend but purchasing would be a financial hardship; we’ll work something out, no questions asked!)
Based on 20 years editing, patterns holding works back and prompts to usher them forward.
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Choices: The quick version
1. Deliberate with intention
Over two decades of working with many authors in a variety of genres, patterns emerged. I found myself asking versions of the same questions again and again—all to prompt writers toward sentence structure, phrase, and word choices that supported the vision they meant to get on paper or screen. I’ve given myself the same prompts in guiding my own work from one draft to the next. How interesting, I thought, that we all so often make similar early choices and can use the same questions to guide us closer and closer to what we meant to say and how we wanted to get there.
It’s not surprising that this line in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer caught my attention: “Every page was once blank, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final results of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.”
2. Recognize the coming together of ideas
I similarly grinned when, in On Writing, Stephen King talks about the origin of good story ideas. “No Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers,” he says, but “quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
I love the emphasis on the import of the joining. Isn’t the making of unlikely unions among the primary roles of a writer, after all? And while I do believe King’s referring to ideas on a macro level, l think his suggestion can be applied on a micro level as well. In the process of questioning our choices around specific sentence structures, phrases, and words, there can appear, as if out of nowhere, connections we might not have otherwise made. Knowing that possibility exists makes it all the more likely we will recognize these junctures when they show up and use them to usher our works in progress toward our visions for them.
3. Turn to face the world
While purpose is admittedly fodder for a different discussion, saying or showing something to readers seems a likely universal motivation for writing, whatever genre or topic we find ourselves circling around. In, “Baking a Cake,” Natalie Goldberg talks about the skillful use of details to convey whatever it is we want to tell the world. “In writing with detail,” she says, “you are turning to face the world … You are not just staying in the heat of your emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.” Of course, which details you choose to include and why is another matter of choice.
I believe we can learn to recognize the tendencies in our own writing, especially those that may keep us from getting as close to our vision as currently possible. And I believe we can learn how to best prompt ourselves to see all the choices available and land on what’s alive for both us and readers.
To dig deeper into the tendencies I’ve found common among authors and myself and the prompts I’ve developed to open up and narrow choices—plus have access to all the workshops for reaching our vision and their course material and exercises, smash that subscribe/upgrade button. An annual subscription means twelve months of access to what’s there and what’s coming.
PS. If you’d LOVE to attend this workshop and $45 for an annual subscription and access to all workshops or $15 for a single workshop would be a financial hardship, hit me up by email, and we’ll work something out. No questions asked.
PPS. What people are saying about the workshops
♥️🔥 If you’re on Notes and wanna restack this post, I would be ever so grateful. Thank you!
What qualifies me to offer these workshops? Over two decades, I’ve edited more than a thousand manuscripts, from memoir to fiction to self-help and lots in between. Whether as a developmental, content, or line editor or a co/ghost writer, I’ve seen my job as helping authors transform works they’ve knitted from the fibers of their beings into the best versions possible. Before that, I was briefly an award-winning journalist. I’ve written for clients ranging from question-answering systems to influencers to nonprofits. And I’ve overseen mini zines and small publications as managing/assigning editor.
All artwork for the Rolling Desk is by the crazy talented Alexandra Rickards. Check out her art and think of her for your next project need!
Thanks Holly, I think I need to rinse and repeat your wise guidance often , so it really sinks in.