A guide to identifying - and developing - personal and universal stakes in your stories.

An engaging and immersive story has to make readers feel as if something is at stake. This workshop will provide writers with the tools to identify and develop multiple layers of tension to strengthen their narratives. Through guided writing exercises, feedback sessions and discussions of excerpts from published work, participants will map out their own fiction stories by considering the sources of internal and external tension that drive plot and character motivation.

Learning outcomes

As part of this workshop, you'll learn to:

Identify sources of tension in stories
Understand the relationship between tension and major conflict in a narrative
Develop key scenes that contain narrative tension
Articulate character motivations and "wants" as a way to to build tension effectively

Format

This is a live stream workshop, with a focus on craft; it will be held online via Zoom. It is a level 1 course and is suitable to attend for writers of all levels: beginners, intermediate and emerging. A 7-day replay will be made available to participants.

About Balli

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the internationally bestselling author of five novels, including Inheritance, which won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award, and Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, which was a Reese Witherspoon's Book Club pick. Jaswal's non-fiction work has appeared in the New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, Griffith Review and Vogue, among other publications. She has a Phd in Creative Writing and teaches workshops on a range of topics to help writers develop their narratives.

For more information about Queensland Writers Centre’s Program of Events and answers to FAQs, please visit: www.queenslandwriters.org.au/program-info