About this Event
Our annual retreat is just as much about craft as it is about community! Join us for a fun day out at a beautiful mansion! Breakfast, lunch, and a late-afternoon cocktail hour are INCLUDED with your ticket!
Join us for our annual weekend Retreat at the MIT Endicott House in Dedham, MA! Featuring 3 author talks, this event is a great way to socialize with fellow Guild (and community!) writers, get out of the house, do some writing in a beautiful location and, of course, learn something new!
We're delighted to welcome author Mark Cecil and debut author Lyndsay Ely to the Guild for the event and we're delighted to welcome back author and professor Peter Medeiros, a fan favorite!
We will be announcing extra digital bonuses for this Retreat shortly, but for now we want to get sales open for the event so everyone has enough time to register. Ticket sales will end on Monday, September 29th.
Your ticket includes: ($250)
- Continental breakfast and chef-prepared lunch at the Endicott House.
- 3 awesome in-person author talks
- Invitation to our new cocktail reception!
Extra options!
- Dinner meetup on Friday, October 3rd at a local restaurant
- Late-night write-in at the mansion!
Here are this year's talks:
Original vs Licensed Works with Lyndsay Ely:
There's more than one way to have a writing career. Lyndsay Ely will discuss writing and publishing original works vs. work for hire, specifically within the extended universe of an established brand/intellectual property. This will include the pros vs. cons of each, the differences in contracts, and how each may come about. She will also touch upon long form vs short form, and is happy to take a stab at any questions folks bring with them!
The Human Journey: The Essential 3 Ingredients of Storytelling with Mark Cecil:
There are all kinds of stories in the world, but what do they all have in common? Step 1: A problem arrives in a person's life, forcing them to change. Step 2: The person sets out to change that problem. Step 3: The person either succeeds or fails (and the reader finds out why, as well.) The End! This three step Human's Journey can be used for any story at all: from An Epic Quest With A Magic Ring to mending a relationship with your estranged sister, to finding a good cup of coffee in your neighborhood. Scenes, chapters, books and even whole multi-season TV series use variations on The Human Journey in vast and intricate patterns. Learn to use it in your own work, to revise, diagnose problems, clean up your pacing, add excitement, and generate new ideas.
Setting as Character with Peter Medeiros
Whether you're writing space opera or a young adult memoir, a crime novel or a short story set in Albany…every story has setting. Truly great settings live in our minds. Mary Karr's Texas, bursting with a million human comedies and tragedies. Frank McCourt's economically depressed Ireland. The imaginative far-future worlds of N.K. Jemisin. All of these have one thing in common: the setting isn't just where the story happens, it is an integral part of the story. In fact, the settings act much like characters.
In this short workshop, we will review different theories and pieces of craft advice to help us build well-rendered settings…in any genre. We will look at how contemporary authors have created active, "living" settings that "work" like characters on the page. Finally, we will take some time to practice these techniques, with the goal of creating settings that feel both real and alive—no matter how fantastical they may seem. This workshop is great for fiction and narrative non-fiction writers, and even poets! However, writers revising a book-length project will probably get the most out of the course.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
MIT Endicott House, 80 Haven Street, Dedham, United States
USD 250.00
