Will your opening pages make your readers keep reading? Will the final chapters make them hope you're writing another book?
How to Begin & End Your Story – THE TOUGHEST PART OF WRITING??
We revise our first and last chapters more than any others. This is where you either earn a reader’s rapt attention or lose it. Let’s learn what an opening chapter is supposed to do, how to achieve this, and how to avoid the most common mistakes.
And then there’s the ending! We work so hard to get there, but do the final chapters satisfy your readers? Will they tell their friends to buy your book? Will they buy your next book?
Whether you’re writing a novel, memoir, or other non-fiction, first and last chapters are tough to get right, but so important!
MYRA CAN HELP! As always, this is a free 90-minute seminar on Zoom, presented LIVE so you can ask questions and get help.
What You’ll Learn
- Why first & last chapters are so important and how they can work together
- Why the actual beginning of a story may not be the best place to start
- Simple and effective ways to introduce your main character
- What is a “payoff,” why readers love these, and how to set them up
- How to bring together plot and subplots and create a great ending.
- Classic types of endings – and even your memoir needs a great ending!
What You’ll Do in the Workshop
- Examine great first lines to see why they work
- Compare types of opening and closing chapters
- You’ll practice improving dull first lines
- You’ll do brief writing prompts, so have a computer or paper and pen handy
Who Should Attend
- New writers are always welcome. We all work at our own level
- Writers with work-in-progress
- Experienced writers open to a new twist on what they already know.
BONUS OFFER
- There will be too many participants to share our writing during the seminar, but you can email your prompts to Myra for personal (free) feedback
About Myra
Myra Levine is on a mission: To make sure that nobody dies with their story still inside them. She shows writers how to turn their lives, experiences, and areas of expertise into memoirs and novels, and teaches writing techniques not taught in school. And her classes are FUN.
Writing isn’t about knowing where to put the commas; it’s about capturing a moment and bringing it to life. As a writing coach, Myra helps her clients master the tools of fiction, like point of view, dialog, setting, and character development to bring their writing to a higher level. The germ of an idea can become a great story, or a dozen great stories, or a terrific novel—and a coach can cut years of frustration from the job of writing a great book.
Before turning to fiction and publishing two novels, Myra spent decades writing television and radio scripts, instructional videos, and corporate marketing programs. She won many local and regional advertising awards before leaving corporate life to become a wife and mother of two adopted kids. Stay-at-home-motherhood rekindled her ambition to write fiction.
As Myra puts it, “If you turn the truth into fiction, you’re less likely to get sued.”
Her live seminars attract writers from all over the world.
Written under the name M.E. Levine, Myra’s novels, Revenge of the Soccer Moms and The Dead Mothers’ Club, are available on Amazon.com (print & e-book) and Audible.com (audiobook).