2007 Fiction Boot Camp!

Join New York Times-bestselling author William Bernhardt, Oprah Book Club author Billie Letts, and Oklahoma Book Award winner Will Thomas for an all-day advanced seminar on the critical elements of writing fiction. During the eight-hour course, Bernhardt will discuss the importance of understanding the shape of your story, of combining action, dialogue, and description to bring your fictional beings to life. Guest speaker Billie Letts will discuss how she creates the memorable characters that populate her novels, including her Walter Percy Literary Award-winning novel "Where the Heart Is." Will Thomas, author of five acclaimed Victorian-era mysteries, including "Some Danger Involved," will discuss the secrets of spellbinding plotting that keeps readers glued to the story. Other important elements such as theme, setting, and prose style will also be discussed. Whether you are writing literary fiction, popular fiction, novels or short stories, this seminar will give you the inside in-depth knowledge you need to create top-quality, publishable fiction.

The Fiction Boot Camp will take place at the Marriott-Tulsa Southern Hills on July 7, 2007. Participants will receive materials in advance upon registration to assist in preparing for the workshop, so they can obtain the maximum benefit. More written materials, including the 2007 Fiction Book Camp Handbook, will be provided upon arrival. Additionally, all participants will have an opportunity to meet William Bernhardt and the other speakers. Furthermore, after the event, all participants are invited to test what they learned by submitting portions of their work-in-progress to be professionally edited and critiqued by a member of the HAWK Publishing staff! This is a rare opportunity to put your writing on the track toward professional publication.




One of the chief goals of the Fiction Boot Camp will be to discuss to the critical relationship between story structure and character. As a lifelong student of the narrative form (Bernhardt has a Masters Degree in English Literature) and a frequent practitioner (Bernhardt has published twenty-three books, most of them bestsellers), Bernhardt is uniquely qualified to discuss the principles that underlie quality literary or popular fiction. As Bernhardt explains, structure is not plot, rigid rules, or formulae; story structure is about understanding the relationship between your characters and the story you want to tell for maximum effectiveness.

William Bernhardt’s 2007 Fiction Boot Camp is a comprehensive exploration of the key elements of fiction and how to make them come to life in your own work, helping writers produce writing of the highest quality.

Topics include:

• The writer and the art of storytelling
• Story construction: the meaning or theme of the story, the substance of the story, the interaction between character, story, and setting.
• Premise idea, counter-idea, controlling idea; archplot, miniplot, antiplot
• The universal outline: act, scene, sequence
• Character construction: speaking from the heart, integrating story and character to exemplify the people and world you want to bring to life
• The critical role of the inciting incident
• Other important character landmarks: turning points, emotional dynamics, setup and payoff, the nature of choice
• Ordering and linking scenes; when to break scenes; how much is enough?
• The tricky business of exposition: dramatizing your characters, creating back story, bringing them to life in the reader’s eyes
• Crisis, climax and resolution
• Putting the elements of story together
• Prose style: description, dialogue, and poetics
• The spectrum of story genres
• Scene analysis: text and sub-text; design through dialogue versus design through action; never underestimate your reader
• The writer's method: working from the inside out; the creative process from inspiration to final draft.
• The working habits of the professional writer


Register today!