Join award-winning authors Connie Willis and Yoon Ha Lee for a two-day intensive writing workshop held in Seattle this June.
The workshops will bookend the Locus Awards weekend.
Friday, June 22, 2018, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 24, 2018, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
$255
DAY ONE: YOON HA LEE: “DESIGN-A-WORLD: MAKING UNIQUE WORLDS FROM START TO FINISH”
Worldbuilding means different things to many people, whether it’s starting from a star system coalescing out of a gas cloud or map-making or building plausible cultures. But ideas for interesting worlds and societies can come from many places, such as historical battles, computer games, or security engineering – or even math; Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland combines Euclidean geometry with a satire on Victorian society to create a unique world of its own. In this workshop we’ll look at different kinds of worldbuilding and levels of realism or mimesis, and design some worlds of our own.
DAY TWO: CONNIE WILLIS: “GET ‘EM AT THE GET-GO, KEEP ‘EM TILL THE END: BEGINNING AND ENDING YOUR STORY”
Beginnings are hard! Or are they? Connie Willis will talk about techniques and strategies for opening your story – how to write an effective first line, of course, but also the many ways there are to begin a story, how the beginning of a tale is more often than not where the physical story begins, and how to chose the key moment and method to get the plot rolling. Endings are even trickier. We’ll talk about setup and payoff, fulfilling the promises made to the reader, plus framing and other devices that increase the punch of an ending.
Connie Willis is the critically acclaimed author of Doomsday Book, Passage, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether. Willis has been awarded eleven Hugo Awards, eleven Locus Awards and six Nebula Awards. Her stories have an epic feel to them and range from laugh out loud funny to deadly serious. Her keen observations illuminate the humor, love, and redemption found in both the comic and the tragic. Celebrated as a humorist with spot-on comic timing, she also uses her fiction to examine larger questions: the nature of God, the persistence of suffering and loss, and the role of love and redemption. Willis most recently won a Hugo Award for her books Blackout and All Clear (August 2011). She was inducted to the Science Fiction Museum and Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2011.
Yoon Ha Lee’s debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. 
His next book, Revenant Gun, is forthcoming from Solaris Books in June 2018, and his Korean mythology space opera for younger readers, Dragon Pearl, is forthcoming from Disney-Hyperion in January 2019. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and a very lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Locus Writers Workshops
Locus Magazine has been co-running a writing workshop in Seattle around the Locus Awards Weekend for the past few years and also runs classes in the Bay Area. Past instructors include Charlie Jane Anders, Gail Carriger, Christopher Barzak, Carrie Vaughn, Daryl Gregory, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Park, and Connie Willis.
Thinking of attending? Please do. We support diversity! We encourage people of color, women, people with disabilities, older people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to apply. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, size, nationality, religion, culture, education level, and self-identification.
