Vanessa Grant - Seminars

• Writing Romance - Audio Seminars Learn about writing romance while driving your car, or relaxing in your living room. This 8-tape cassette album includes a variety of Vanessa's seminars on character building, writing, pacing, conflict, and suspense.
• A Writer's Creativity - Audio Seminars Use these four tapes to enhance your creativity with special visualization and relaxation exercises for writers.
• Writing Romance - Online - learn the skills and techniques that can help you become a best-selling romance author with Vanessa Grant, multipublished author with over 10 million books sold. Course starts October 10
• Myths and Mystery - Online - Enrich your Romantic Suspense, Mystery or Intrigue story with Archetypes and the Hero's Journey.

Writing Romance - AudioSeminars

Bookcase album includes these 8 tapes Writing Women's Fiction - part 1 Writing Women's Fiction - part 2 About Men and Women Character Driven Plotting Conflict for Writers Pacing to Maintain Tension From Spark to Finish Territory - From Character to Conflict

A Writer's Creativity - Audio Seminars

Bookcase album includes these 4 tapes Finding Your Creative Muse Evicting your Inner Critic Writer's Block and the Garbage Can Relaxation and Imagery

Seminar Descriptions

Writing Women's Fiction, parts 1 and 2

Three hour lecture on tape. Topics include: Components of successful women's fiction. Plotting and characterization techniques used by professional writers. Timeless story themes and powerful archetypes. Where to find best-selling plot ideas: your fears, your dreams, and your hang-ups. Your home town as an exotic setting. Finding time to write. Getting from idea to finished novel. Characters, motivation, conflict, tension, and plot. Keeping track. What to do if you get stuck. How to find a writing mentor. How to know if your novel is ready. (2 audio cassettes)

About Men and Women

One of Vanessa's most popular lectures. Do your men talk and act like men? Are your women believable women of the twenty-first century? Drawing from her own experience as a writer, and recent discoveries about the difference between men and women, Vanessa discusses how to write about the sexes believably.

Character Driven Plotting

Vanessa discusses the nature of plot, and the difference between writer driven and character driven plots. Examples of how realistic characters can be grown by a writer, including worksheets for developing concepts of character relationships and character behavior patterns. How to develop backstory, and how character personality plus backstory can drive plotting for realistic conflict and plots. Complete with examples from Grant's own TAKING CHANCES.

Conflict for Writers

Vanessa discusses the difference between conflict and fighting, how to create believable conflict in your fiction. Want/can't have as the conflict driver. The relationship between conflict and emotional intensity. Archetypal situations with inherent strong conflict. Natural conflict versus writer-imposed conflict. Types of conflict that generally don't work in romantic fiction.

From Spark to Finish - How a Story Grows

This popular lecture describes the process of writing a novel, from the original concept of the story spark, through development of characterization, backstory, and conflict, including examples of how to move a story idea that is stuck, to development of plot. Includes examples of how Vanessa keeps track of timelines and other continuity details. Examples are drawn from her book YESTERDAY'S VOWS. (Complete book notes for YESTERDAY'S VOWS are available in Vanessa's Writing Romance.)

Pacing to Maintain Tension

Vanessa makes this complex technical subject clear with graphic examples in a lecture she's given to writers conferences in Missouri, Alberta, and British Columbia. Topics include: Time and the writer: story time, reader time, and writer time. The simple rule that covers it all. How pacing relates to viewpont and narrative style.

Territory - The Bridge Between Character and Conflict

Knowing your characters is the single most important preparation for writing a good book, but how do you move from character to conflict? Vanessa describes how to develop conflict by discovering when your characters will behave irrationally, and when they will instinctively defend their territory. Using Grant's concept of territory, writers can readily determine their characters' territorial boundaries and predict situations that will create realistic conflict every reader can relate to.

Evicting Your Internal Critic

One of a writer's worst enemies is the internal critic who says "You can't do it. Who do you think you are? Do you know how hard it is to get published?" Use this powerful technique from Vanessa Grant Oltmann's upcoming book Images for Life to silence the voices that set your limits.

Finding your Creative Muse

Vanessa discusses ways of making creation of stories and art easier. Topics include left and right brain for the writer and artist, using muses, finding your creative muse. Includes dynamic visualization exercise for finding your muse, and examples of how several professional writers use the muse concept.

Writer's Block and the Garbage Can

Does writer's block exist? Vanessa Grant discusses the merits of not believing in writers block, and strategies to use when you or your story gets stuck. Included is Grant's popular Garbage Can tactic for rescuing a stuck story idea.

Relaxation and Imagery

Close your eyes; listen to nature's sounds as Vanessa guides you in an invigorating session of guided relaxation and imagery.