Fall 2025 Workshops

How good is my story? How can I make it better? Is it publishable? These essential questions weigh heavily on every writer's mind. You need precise, comprehensive feedback to answer them. That's where the PI™ comes in. A 23 dimension checklist for great stories that organizes creative writing advice to help you produce better work. The PI distills storytelling best practices into a consistent and comprehensive set of standards, which covers each story element plus the synergy between them.

This workshop shows how to use the PI to evaluate your story and to answer the critical question: is my story publishable? More importantly, the checklist identifies areas that need work, issues you must address to satisfy agents and readers. This power means that repeated use of the PI guides your efforts toward a story that readers will love.

Did you know readers relate to fictional characters and real people in exactly the same way? It's true, and you can take advantage of this fact to develop effective characters. The recipe starts with three ingredients: parts of you, cultural universals and specific referents. After explaining these necessities and where to find them, we demonstrate how interacting with your creature blends these diverse aspects into an integrated whole.

Yes, this approach works for aliens, orcs and superheroes as well as everyday humans. We promise these two steps will produce a being whose thoughts and behaviors will emerge organically. This vitality will flow through your words and bring them to life in readers' minds, creating the deep empathy compelling novels need.

Everyone says your first chapters must be compelling, but how do you get there? What specifically do readers expect? They expect you to pique their interest and set the stage for a satisfying read. When your first chapter is in great shape, your reader won't want to put the book down.

In this workshop we'll focus on balance: providing the right amount of words to introduce the protagonist and build the storyworld; hinting at themes which will draw readers in; confirming the genre; and most importantly, crafting an inciting incident that leaves your readers with little choice but to turn the page.

This workshop explains these four requirements, shows how to meet them and, as a bonus, provides a simple test to see whether your chapter measures up.

Delivering a resonant message turns good stories into great ones. Assuming this theme will emerge without conscious effort is a big risk. Your success depends on developing a message that avoids generalities to share something distinctly yours. Articulating your messages as an overarching theme will also guide your writing, especially during revisions, ensuring your novel will have a lasting impact.

This workshop will show you how to discover your novel's unique message by examining your words and motivations. Then, it explains why you should align your story's elements with that idea. This technique leads to a resonant story, where every page counts because every scene is thematically relevant, leaving a lasting impression that readers will remember and share.

Producing a publishable novel requires more than great writing; it demands you orchestrate every piece into a coherent whole. Success comes from going back and forth between micro and macro as you write, reordering, dropping, or adding sections even as you continually reshape your story.

Bardsy's Minimum Complete Story is here to help. It provides a dynamic tool to guide your work while ensuring your novel's coherence. Put simply, it's the smallest version of your story, a 10,000-foot overview that distills your novel to its essentials. Update your MCS as your novel evolves, saying it aloud regularly. This technique combats writer's block and promotes efficiency. More importantly, you'll uncover issues for your subconscious to resolve. Best of all, making it part of your process leads to a more coherent novel.

This workshop explains why the MCS works and how to create and use your own. You can also practice yours if you want.

Like it or not, readers are customers who have to be satisfied. The question to ask: why would a reader pick your book over another? Or, what makes your novel special? There's no easy answer. It's also complicated, in part because many writers shy away from marketing.

This workshop offers a proven framework to help with your answer. The first part is genre, the reason most books are bought. We'll go over defining yours and fulfilling its promise through your story. Next comes character; we'll cover how to establish a necessary resonance between yours and likely readers. Finally, we uncover the spice you and your story must offer to make it stand out. Then, we show how to weave this value into every chapter.

After walking you through this framework, we'll go over successful examples and talk through your project if you want.

One hard choice novelists face is what to put in each chapter. You have two somewhat opposed goals: to make it satisfying, yet leave readers wanting more. Meanwhile, each chapter has to tie into what happened before and what comes next while leaving space for your story's ongoing arc.

Our way to resolve this issue concentrates on spreading your story evenly, so each chapter has just enough material and no more. Balancing this equation requires knowing your story and then separating its chapters in the right places. Whether you use post-its, index cards or a spreadsheet, this workshop shows you how to think about your story, so you can extract and organize the right elements.

You can use this technique prospectively to plan your novel, retrospectively to guide revisions and any time in between. Best of all, it adapts to your novel to accommodate changes. After all, you never know when inspiration may strike.