Plot

Begin, Muddle, End: How to Write a Full Story

Stuck on your story? Don’t know where to start? What happens next? How will it end?

This workshop will walk participants through a variety of techniques for beating writer’s block or a lack of ideas at any point in your first draft. These techniques will ensure you can write a story all the way through, from beginning to middle to end—whether you’ve written a story before or not!

We’ll discuss what causes writers to get stuck, or “blocked”. We’ll learn strategies for tackling the blank page.

How do you get words down on paper or screen even when you feel completely uninspired (Beginning)?

How do you move the story forward when you have no idea what the action or plot is supposed to be (Middle)?

Finally, how do you bring the story to a satisfying resting point (Ending)?

By the end of this workshop, you will have produced multiple iterations of a story—possibilities to test out and play with, to see which one(s) you prefer, or which combination packs the biggest punch. You will have a number of beginnings, middles, and endings—versions of the same story—to mix and match.

Along with developing comfort with story structure, this workshop helps prevent us from getting too attached to initial story choices. It will jog creativity, so we can consider what else might work to make the story even better.

Come join this friendly, low-stakes writing workshop, and beat writer’s block once and for all!

What Participants Will Take Away

• New writing produced in the workshop.
• How to write a beginning, middle, and end.
• How to beat writer’s block.

There will be an optional opportunity to share.

Suitable for beginning and intermediate writers.

Date Saturday, May 13, 2023: 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EDT / 6 PM BST

About Instructor
Marion Lougheed is a writer, editor, and anthropologist who grew up in Canada, Benin, Belgium and Germany. As far as she knows, her family was not running from the cops. Her writing was shortlisted for the Sunlight Press Flash Fiction Contest and anthologized in This Will Only Take a Minute (Guernica Editions, 2022), among others. She runs Off Topic Publishing and lives with her partner in Toronto and Berlin.

Registration:

Want to register? Sign up for the mailing list and you’ll be notified when registration opens in April.

Click here for the text version of the May 13 time zone map.