I’ve thought a lot about Making Meaning – because as writers I believe that’s what we do. We tell stories about life, about love, and in those stories we send messages we believe are meaningful: Life is Complicated, Love is a Decision, Love Conquers All—whatever it is we believe about life and love, we create people and stories to make that belief manifest. We make meaning.

But sometimes we get stalled, we get overwhelmed. We lose our way. 

This virtual workshop tells the story of one of my journeys to making meaning, and how I found my way back to being a storyteller.

Welcome to Virtual Workshops for Storytellers. 

I began my career writing a newspaper column about life on a lighthouse, and I went on to become a freelance journalist and radio broadcaster, writing novels in my spare time.

I was thrilled when my first novel sold in 1985, and since then I've written 34 more novels and two non-fiction works. I've also taught workshops for writers in Canada, the U.S.A., Australia, and New Zealand. 

I originally recorded the videos in this course as virtual workshops for my local library, for patrons who wanted to explore the craft of writing and storytelling with a professional author.  

In these six lessons, you’ll explore …

1. How to use your personal experiences and research to create meaningful stories
2. How to develop believable characters by creating past events that trigger the necessary driving forces of goal, motivation, and conflict necessary to drive the story to its conclusion.
3. How to use the rhythm of stimulus and response, and scene and sequel, to bring your story alive following a pattern embedded in our human brains. 
4. An example of how to create the necessary conflict to drive your story forward to the story goal
5. How to avoid the trap of writing in circles,  and finally …
6. How you can use a "garbage can" strategy that I developed to fight writer's block