The Path of Story: Awakening to our Life

Taught by Nina Wise
A 6-week writing adventure on Zoom

Week 1: Guidelines and Tips
We will review the guidelines that can make our writing more effective in a way that is revealing for ourselves and experiential for our readers.

Week 2: Finding the profound that lies hidden in the mundane and grounding our big stories in their sense detail
As a writer, whether as a memoirist, screenplay writer, playwright, novelist or performer, our job is not to report our experiences but to allow our reader/audience to have an experience. To do this, we reveal our situation through its component parts: setting, character, moment in history, and the experience of our senses.

Week 3: Scene and Description
A reader can best experience a story if the writer presents a scene: a particular set of actions in a particular place with particular characters. But scenes are not always efficient ways of communication important information that is vital to our narrative. So we rely on description. In this session, we will practice writing a scene and writing a description and examine the strengths and limitations of each.

Week 4: The Presence of the Past
The way we experience our lives in the present is conditioned by experiences we’ve had in the past. In this session, we will let narratives from the past percolate into our storytelling to reveal the depth and meaning of our current situations.

Week 5: Writing as Revelation
We’ve practiced some of the elements of the craft of writing. Now we will look at why we write. We write to come to know ourselves, to know what we think and what we feel. We write to connect to others, to eradicate the sense of isolation that so many of us feel. We write to develop empathy for others, to see the world from a point of view other than our own and so arrive at understanding and forgiveness. We write to heal the wounds that haunt us. Today we will practice writing as a journey of revelation.

Week 6: Narrative Structure: Causality, Escalation, Climax, Resolution
What makes a story work? The structure of a story, its internal architecture, can be one of the most elusive elements of our craft. While there is a classical story structure, there are also many experimental ones that authors invent for the needs of their original work. In this session, we will focus on structure and how it applies to our own work.

Wednesdays, 10:00–11:30am PT
April 20–May 25
6 weeks for $195
$175 for current students, discount available through April 13

Refund Policy

We do our best to keep our fees very affordable and hope you understand that there are many administrative hours and costs that are involved in running our programs. We also understand that things come up for people and want to accommodate your change of plans as best we can. So here is our refund policy:

The registration fee for Motion’s online events is non-refundable. If you withdraw within one week prior to the first session, the fee you paid can be applied to a future Motion Theater workshop within one year (less 20% processing fee).

* All workshop sessions are recorded and available for 4 weeks after the final workshop session. The links will be sent to you each week (only for those registered for a multi-week series).

* Motion will consider refund requests due to an extraordinary circumstance or emergency on a case by case basis if you withdraw within one week prior to the first session. To request a refund of this nature, please contact us and explain your situation.