WINTER-SUMMER 2026
WRITING SUCCESS SERIES WEBINARS
All workshops held from 7:30-9:30 PM ET, Thursday nights on Zoom.
Confirmation details will be sent one week prior to class and repeated the day of class.
All sessions are recorded, and the link to access those will be sent to all participants within twenty-four hours of the webinar.
FREE DISCOVERY NIGHT WEBINAR!
February 19th, 2026 • 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM ET
Join us for a no-cost sneak peek of our entire webinar series, with quick craft lessons from our Writing Success Series faculty, including: Beth Barany, Debbie Burke, Kate Dane, Sheree Greer, Janice Hardy, Angela Hunt, Henry Lien, Donald Maass, Henry Neff, Lorin Oberweger, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Rob Sanders, Nina Simon, Jason Sitzes, Damon Suede, and Roman White.
A can’t-miss evening of lessons from our stellar faculty!
Webinar Deals
Purchase Entire Success Series for $699. (The equivalent of five free webinars.)
Donald Maass Four-Webinar Bundle for $139.
Spend at least $225, receive $35 off (automatically applied to your cart)
Spend at least $450, receive $70 off (automatically applied to your cart)
DELUXE TWO-PART WEBINARS offer even deeper dives into their topics, with homework, more opportunities for sharing, and more hands-on work.
With this purchase, you will be added to the registration list for all of the webinars in the Winter-Summer 2026 Session, including the Deluxe Two-Part Webinars. Descriptions of each webinar can be found on the Success Series page. As each webinar approaches, you will receive an email with further details.
With this purchase, you will be added to the registration list for all four webinars taught by Donald Maass. As each webinar date approaches, you will receive an email with further details.
FEBRUARY 26: GREAT ENDINGS POINT BACKWARD
MARCH 26: PACE IS MORE THAN SPEED
MAY 28: WHAT MAKES DRAMA RISE
JUNE 25: PRO PITCHING FOR PRO NOVELISTS
Every writer wants a great ending, but a powerful effect lies not in the ending itself. It’s in how that ending is prepared earlier in a novel. Learn the methods of working backward to make a strong, multi-layered finale in this hands-on webinar.
The best villains are worthy opponents who push heroes to their limits and keep readers mesmerized. Whether villains hide behind the scenes in whodunnit mysteries or are identified early in genres like suspense and thrillers, the author needs to focus on what drives these critical antagonists.
This webinar zeroes in on the villain's motivations, plans, and actions. What is the secret desire behind their goal? Why are they wreaking havoc? Where are they lurking? How do they intend to destroy the hero?
Delve deep into the villain's heart and mind. Discover techniques to build dreaded anticipation as the villain closes in. Learn how their schemes and attacks raise the threat to the hero and ratchet up fear and fascination for the reader.
A plotting class even pantsers love… Even when a happy ending is certain, a great plot keeps your writing fresh while anchoring your audience and amplifying your voice. Learn how to craft a sure-fire creative framework that will keep you on the path to success, whatever your genre, media, and writing style. We’ll go beyond the bullet points, soundbites, and blather to dig into the wisdom in all plot theory with ample examples, nuts-n-bolts craft wisdom, and exercises to help you navigate your process.
Rather hammering on one “true” blueprint, we’ll break down the major story models from Aristotle to Netflix, identify their seven shared points, and help you develop your own narrative strategy. We’ll be looking at the Poetics (and Renaissance mutations), Freytag’s pyramid, Showbiz’s 3-Acts, Sequences, Hero’s Journey, Hague’s Inner Arc, Save the Cat, Moral Premise, Harmon’s Story Circle, ABT, Swain’s pulp chassis, Snowflake, W-plot, Kaizen, Regis’ romance beats, and more… so you can take leverage the strengths of each system with panache. Join us for a two-part story-structure blowout that will help you find your own path to the story you need to tell.
Many manuscripts read “slow”, but the solution doesn’t always mean speeding up. Discover the hidden factors that accelerate the reader’s story experience in this hands-on webinar.
Nailing the beginning of your book can feel like a high-stakes tightrope act for a skeptical audience. You have to introduce your characters, world, hook, and plot, all the while aware that the reader, agent, or editor on the other side might stop reading at any time. But you have a superpower at your disposal. The most important thing you can do in the first few pages is something simple: make your reader a promise as to what kind of experience they will have with your story. When your first pages make a strong promise--one that sets up expectations regarding tone, pace, and experience--you will find and delight the readers who want to fall in love with your book. In this workshop, we'll use real-world examples to explore effective, weak, and confusing promises, and you'll experiment with ways to make the promise in your premise as clear and captivating as possible.
So many writers want their stories to feel vivid and immersive, but setting often gets brushed aside, reduced to “just enough” to get by. And most advice about setting is either very surface-level (“add more sensory detail!”) or so academic that it doesn’t connect to the actual work of writing compelling, character-driven fiction.
This class is for fiction writers who want to create a rich, immersive world without writing paragraphs of description; who care about tone, character, genre, and emotional resonance; who want tools that help them revise with clarity, not guesswork; and who are ready to understand setting as more than scenery
In this class, we’ll explore: what setting really does for a story, and how to use it with intention; how to evaluate your opening through the lens of time, place, genre, and character; how your character’s worldview and emotional filter shape what they notice; practical framing techniques (wide, medium, close-up) to control pacing and mood; and guided exercises to help you revise and enhance your opening scenes
This is a hands-on DELUXE TWO-PART class with examples, reflection, and time to apply what you’re learning in real time. Please note: these classes are not consecutive. Mark your calendars accordingly!
The well-known writing instructor, Gary Provost, offered Five Essential Plot Points to effectively drive a narrative. In this workshop, we’ll examine those plot points and help you apply those them to your work-in-progress, no matter the genre.
From there, we’ll move onto themes. Why are they important? How do they speak to your readers? Where the heck do you find them and make them original?
We will combine the overall night of topics by working through how a theme can drive plot, and how plot can reveal theme. As always, our two hours will offer many exercises that both drive home the material and help make your work connect with greater purpose to both you and your readers.
The Plot Skeleton—never feel lost in your story again! After writing dozens of novels and reading as many book on plotting, Angela Hunt was hired to teach plot to third graders. She came up with a simple visual, and the more she worked with it, the more she realized that it works for ANY story, in ANY format or genre. Now she uses it herself when she sits down to write a book proposal. Perfect for plotters and pantsers, the plot skeleton is all you need to lay out your story and keep from getting stuck in the middle.
As most of us know, “show don’t tell” is more than a simplification—it’s wrong. Yet knowing when to show and when to tell is tricky. In this webinar we’ll study how to identify and evaluate each mode in published works (both fiction and memoir) as well as our own, so that we can gain clarity on how the modes are intricately woven. We’ll study how showing helps create impact and immerses the reader directly into story and how telling helps with pacing, creates context, foregrounds voice, and clarifies insights and turning points. We’ll specifically look at how the modes, alone or in tandem, operate in dialogue and description, at heightened story moments, and in quieter moments of reflection and interpretation. Finally, we’ll recognize how the balance of showing and telling varies considerably, according to a writer’s individual style and sometimes genre.
Discussions in the West around diversity in the arts often focus on the identities of characters and creators. However, true diversity is about more than just plopping different faces into stories that are 100 percent Western in spirit; it can―and should―encompass diverse structures, themes, and values. The program explores how storytelling staples in the West, such as the three-act structure and themes of empowerment and change, are far from universal. It introduces viewers to the East Asian four-act story structure and explains how Eastern value systems such as collectivism can dictate form.
Most writers create characters.
Actors fight for roles.
In this live webinar, Roman White will show you how to stop writing characters that technically “work” and start writing the kind people obsess over—the roles actors crave, readers remember, and stories are built around.
You’ll break down why some characters feel alive and performable while others, even beautifully written ones, fall flat. You’ll learn how actors evaluate material, what makes a role irresistible, and how to rewrite scenes so your characters feel specific, playable, and impossible to ignore.
So if you’ve ever been told your characters are “interesting…”
If your scenes feel solid but don’t quite hit…
If you want your characters to feel like someone could step into them and breathe—
This one’s for you.
What exactly is “drama”? How does it increase to a level of high tension over the course of a story? Explore the inner and outer factors that contribute to story excitement in this hands-on webinar.
Do you have an abandoned story lingering on your computer or in a drawer somewhere? A half-dozen promising openings that never went where you wanted? Have you been captivated by certain ideas or fallen in love with a character but never quite found the right story for them? If so, this is the class for you.
In this hands-on, generative webinar, we’ll revisit old ideas and unfinished stories to find out if there’s a new project among the ruins. We’ll unearth the diamonds in the rough to see what can be repurposed and polished into something magnificent. You might find your way back to the true story of your heart.
Okay, let’s get into it: the query package! In this informative, empowering class, we’ll demystify the query letter and synopsis in a fun and hands-on way; look at multiple approaches for framing your work in the best light; dig into story openings and what they need to captivate both industry gatekeepers and readers in general; analyze real world examples and what made them effective; and play with producing inviting queries, synopses, and openings of our own.
Even if you’re not yet at the stage where you’re preparing your submissions material, this class will still be useful in helping you solidify your story ideas, offering you a True North for not only crafting your work but being able to express its essence in a concrete and potent way. And if you are getting ready to submit your work, this will provide an effective roadmap for setting yourself—and your story—up for publishing success.
Every writer sooner or later must pitch, but agents do so every day. What’s different when an agent does it? Learn what’s important in a pitch and pro tips and tricks in this try-it-yourself webinar.
Updated for 2026 and back by popular demand! A compelling plot is essential to commercial fiction. It propels the narrative, sets the pace, and provides opportunities for characters to grow as they strive to achieve something meaningful. No one wants to write, much less read, an incoherent mess or yawn-inducing bore. This workshop will help you avoid these fatal flaws by charting a story path that not only sparks a reader’s interest but builds it by utilizing worthy stakes, sound structure, lively pacing, shocking twists, and satisfying payoffs. No more messes, no more snores — just engaged readers asking that most gratifying question: “What happens next?”
What’s unsaid is often more compelling than what’s stated clearly, and the most gripping stories come from what the reader feels, not sees. Those moments of insight, quiet realizations, and understanding about what isn’t on the page. In this workshop, you’ll discover how to use dialogue and silence to expose hidden motives, how shifting power in a scene creates unspoken tension, and how theme quietly connects every choice your characters make. You’ll explore way to shape the story beneath your story and how to weave emotional tension, deepen meaning, and reveal character truths without ever spelling them out.
Sit in scene, stretch it out, elaborate, things are moving too quickly…we writers have heard it all. And then there’s the dreaded words: “I didn’t feel anything.” In many of these instances what’s needed is an exploded moment in time—a micro-moment—that takes the reader deeper into the character’s emotions. In this webinar Rob will show examples from his work and other novels and pictures book to illustrate how to create micro-moments to build emotion and we’ll dive into those texts to understand the writing crafts that helped build those moments. You’ll also have an opportunity to create micro-moments to build emotions in your WIP.
How do you build a character people love or hate, who sticks in the readers’ mind and heart? Let’s talk about entrances that grab the spotlight, prime motivating force (there can be only one), and how to push our characters to make choices hard for them on a personal level, so readers will cheer.
If you’ve ever stared at your own writing and thought, “This is good… but why does it sound like somebody else?”—congrats. You don’t have a voice problem. You have a directing problem.
In this webinar, Roman uses the same tools directors use to wrestle a creative vision into submission—tone, theme, focus, and intention—so you can stop spiraling, stop apologizing, and write like someone who knows exactly why they’re in the room.
We’ll uncover the themes you keep circling, the emotional temperature you default to, and why the moments that make you a little nervous are almost always the moments that land. You’ll walk out with clarity, confidence, and a creative compass that doesn’t need to phone a friend. Drafts tighten up. Rewrites stop dragging. And out of nowhere, your writing starts sounding like someone who knows what they’re doing—and isn’t apologizing for it.
If you’re done asking for permission and ready to write like you mean it, grab a seat. The director’s chair is open—and don’t worry, we already slapped your name on it.