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This free generative fiction workshop for adult writers of all levels will teach you how to apply cinematography techniques to your prose writing to help zoom in and focus on what matters most, heighten tension, and reveal character
Do you have a story inside of you that you're unsure how to tell? Maybe you have a general picture, but the details are hazy. Maybe you have all of the details down, but you aren't sure how to frame it. Or maybe you've got too much and you need help knowing what to leave on the cutting room floor. The good news is: you're already a storyteller, regardless of whether you've written a word. The better news: you'll leave this workshop as a writer. This free generative fiction workshop for adult writers of all levels will teach you how to apply cinematography techniques to your prose writing to help zoom in and focus on what matters most, heighten tension, and reveal character. We will look at and discuss examples of how these techniques are applied in sample excerpts and engage in activities to apply these techniques to our own writing. Participants will leave this workshop with a new toolkit for enhancing and improving their fiction, as well as some freshly generated work.
Pens and notebooks will be provided for participants. You are also welcome to bring your own materials and/or a writing device like a laptop.
Facilitator Elisabeth Giffin Speckman (she/her) received her MFA in Fiction from Butler University. She has taught undergraduate courses in first year studies, prose, academic writing, screenwriting, media literacy, and acting, as well as various youth and community workshops and classes in creative writing and drama. Elisabeth writes in multiple genres. Her plays include Clyt; or, The Bathtub Play (O’Neill Finalist 2023; Henley Rose Finalist) and Catch/Release (Henley Rose Finalist) and have been produced throughout the United States and five other countries. She has developed work with the Yale Writers’ Conference (now Yale Writers’ Workshop), the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, 29th Street Playwrights Collective, The Bechdel Group, The Skeleton Rep(resents), and The Barrow Group, and has studied comedy and sketch writing with Upright Citizens Brigade, Bad Medicine Comedy, and The Second City. Her plays are available via Next Stage Press, YouthPLAYS, and the New Play Exchange, among others. Her short screenplays have been selected, nominated, and awarded in national and international film festivals. Poetry, prose, and photography appears or is forthcoming in trampset, Harrow House, Pink Ochre Literary Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Flash Fiction Magazine, CHEAP POP, Three Line Poetry, and Pidgeonholes, among others. More info at her woefully out of date website egspeckman.com.
About the Butler MFA Community Workshop Series
The Butler MFA Community Workshop series is a free writing program facilitated by Butler University alumni of the MFA in Creative Writing. These one-off workshops, hosted at partner sites including bookstores, nonprofits, and public libraries in the Greater Indianapolis area, connect adults at all stages of their writing journeys with workshop experiences shaped by graduate-level study. Thanks to a generous gift from the Efroymson Family Fund, alumni from the program's concentrations in Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction will guide local writers into creative practice. Each workshop is designed to help participants generate new work, learn new ways of thinking about the craft of writing, and more confidently continue their own writing practices. Learn more about Butler University's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing by visiting their website.
