c c hunter
Christie Craig's Workshops.

christie craig's workshops

Christie Craig's Workshops

In addition to Christie's novels, she and her critique partner, Faye Hughes, are authors of THE EVERYTHING GUIDE TO WRITING ROMANCE NOVELS, which will be released September 08 through Adams Media. Between them, they have sold 12 award-winning romance novels, and their knowledge of the genre comes across in this insightful How-To book that offers advice to the novice, as well as the more experienced writer. Their workshops are educational, inspirational and definitely entertaining. Christie and Faye infuse their sassy, southern-style of humor into their workshops, which makes them a can't-miss event.

While Christie has sold five novels, one novelette, two nonfiction books, published in ten anthologies, and has acquired over 3000 freelance credits, she's also received over 10,000 rejections. Her inspiration and perseverance always comes across in her workshops.

Christie_Craig

Title: Genre Jumping: Moving from Romance into the YA Market
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Length: 1 - 2 hours (flexible)

  • Sexual Tension:
  • Is it just a romance?
  • Importance of Family Relationship
  • Pitfalls and the most common mistakes & quick fixes
  • Find the right voice
  • With the Young Adult market still expanding, many romance authors are considering making a move into the world of YA. And why not? Adult romances have a lot in common with YA romances . . . but they also have a lot of differences, too. Learning those differences can help you take a big wonderful leap into the world of young adult fiction. C.C. Hunter, AKA, Christie Craig, will talk about how she made the sudden and successful leap into the YA market with her popular Shadow Falls series through St. Martin's/Griffin


    Title: Mastering Deep Point Of View
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    Length: 1 - 3 hours (flexible) (Longer workshops include writing exercises)

    Deep Point of View is accomplished through several techniques:

  • Setting & Description
  • Dialogue
  • Internal thoughts
  • Using Emotional Depth
  • The Character's Past and the POV Connection
  • Deep POV is going straight to the heart of your characters. It's about readers making a deeper connection to your heroes, heroines, secondary characters, and even your villains. It's about readers caring more, feeling as if they know and understand your protagonist inside and out. Deep POV brings a character to life, and makes them as real to the reader as their family and friends. Christie Craig teaches you how to put yourself in the character's skin and then how to pull the reader in there with you.


    Title: The Naked Truth: Love Scenes and Other Scenes that Show Your Characters at Their Most Vulnerable
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    Length: 1 to 2 hours (Flexible)

    Readers respond to emotions. It's what makes them invest in the characters. Learn different techniques for writing emotionally charged scenes that will hook your reader, such as:

    • Recognizing and understanding your own comfort level when writing sex
    • Learn tips on writing with emotion
    • Explore techniques on staying in character, even when the chips are down and the clothes are off
    • Gain insight on how to write love scenes that fulfill the reader's expectations

    Put a character in an awkward situation, get them naked either emotionally or physically, and you have a scene with unending opportunity to expose deep characterization, thus allowing the reader to get into the character's skin and become more emotionally involved in the story. For some authors, however, writing these naked scenes can be uncomfortable and leave the author feeling as exposed as the characters she's creating. Christie Craig will show you what's worked for her and give you tips on how you can discover what will work for you.


    Title: Mastering Point of View
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    Length: 1 - 2 hours (flexible)

  • What is POV?
  • First person versus third person (To I or not to I)
  • Omniscient POV & author's voice (What do you mean...I can't write that?)
  • Most common mistakes & quick fixes (Avoiding the POV police)
  • Mastering the POV switch (Head hopping with grace)
  • At first glance, POV seems like an easy thing to master. Yet on second glances, many writers find it harder than herding three-legged cats across a river of molten lava. Choosing how to tell, and who tells your story is crucial to the emotional impact of your novel. Learning the POV rules and guidelines is a must. Learning how to bend those rules and guidelines to fit your story and voice like many of our New York Times' Best-Selling authors, is a technique you'll definitely want to master. Multi-published, award-winning writer, Christie Craig offers simple definitions and techniques that will help demystify the sometimes baffling rules of POV.


    Title: It's Not Just Adding a Naked, Tattooed Guy: Using Humor in Your Writing
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    Length: 1 -2 hours (flexible)

  • Benefits of laughing & laughing hard
  • Humor is emotion
  • Exercising your funny bone
  • Techniques to writing humor
  • This workshop offers suggestions on how to add humor – a little or a lot – to your novel. Highlights include recognizing and exploiting the universal truths in life for comedic effect, the importance of timing and pacing in telling a joke and knowing when to get serious. Attendees should come prepared to laugh...a lot, and learn...a lot about adding humor to enrich their work. Workshop best given by writing team Faye Hughes and Christie Craig, but can be presented by either.


    Title: Making Money While You Make your Way up to Nora Status: Writing For Alternate Markets
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    Length: 1 - 2 hours (flexible)

  • What are alternate markets?
  • How does one go about submitting?
  • Can I really make money writing for the magazines?
  • Have you ever wanted to write something short, just so you could feel a sense of accomplishment? Have you ever wished you could bring in a little income as you work your way to publication or even to a bigger advance? With close to 3000 national credits in the freelance market, Christie Craig, also an award-winning multi-published novelist, offers insight into how you can earn extra income by writing for the magazines. Her step-by-step process of submitting to magazines is easy to follow. Her motivation is contagious to those who want to broaden their career focus and stretch their talents as they try out other writing genres.


    Title: Rejecting Rejection
    Inspiration/ Writer's life
    Length: 1 hour

  • Learn from the rejection (What are the editors really saying?)
  • Allow rejection to motivate you (Don't get mad, get published!)
  • Accept rejection as part of the business
  • Staying motivated even as the rejections pour in
  • Christie Craig has acquired over 3000 national magazine credits, has sold two nonfiction books and five novels, but she's almost as proud of her 10,000 rejections. In a very motivational hour, Christie will share how she managed to focus on the positive in spite of the adversity that is found in the business of writing. With her solid tips and can-do attitude, she entertains, motivates, and inspires writers to fall in love with writing all over again.


    Title: The Great Agent Hunt
    Career
    Length: 1- 2 hours (flexible)

  • Insights to snagging an agent's interest
  • How to know if the agent is right for you
  • Marriage counseling for the bad agent/author relationshi
  • How to survive a bad agent
  • Finding the right agent is almost as hard as finding the right spouse. Learn how to research agents, know the right questions to ask, how to draw an agent's interest, how to make the agent-author relationship work for you and how to sever ties when it's time to move on. Christie and Faye, who have both recently signed with new agents, offer firsthand advice on catching, keeping, and surviving the agent hunt. Workshop best when given by both Christie Craig and Faye Hughes, but can be given by either individual.


    Title: Contests: A Chance to Reel in a Contract or a Sport of Diversion?
    Career/Craft/Motivation
    Length 1 hour

  • Pros and cons of entering contest
  • Real advice, real lessons from a contest diva
  • Tips on making your entry a finalist
  • Are you addicted to entering contests
  • With over 50 placements in RWA sponsored contests, Christie Craig will share the many lessons she's learned. She's experienced the pros and the cons. And she'll tell you both sides of the coin. She offers tips on ways to up your chances of making the finals. She will also share how she, not only, sold her first book in 1994 via a contest, but recently received a three-book contract all from the direct result of a contest.


    Title: Character Motivation: Blame it on Their Parents and Other Ways to Explain Why Our Characters Do What They Do
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    Length: 1- 2 hours (flexible)

  • Why motivation matters (Your character did what?)
  • How to find the motivation that fits your characters
  • Understanding your characters (Explaining why they do what they do)
  • Why does your hero refuse to make a commitment? Why is he afraid of career-driven women? Why can't your heroine trust men? Why does your heroine refuse to wear perfume? Without the proper motivation, our characters not only come across unbelievable and flat, but unsympathetic and sometimes just plain weird. Christie Craig, multi-published author, will help you find the skeletons in your character's closet and bring them out for a dance. Christie will show how a character's background is the key to a character's motivation. She'll explain the difference between the deadly back story that warrants rejections and the much-needed character-building scenes that make our heroes and heroines leap off the pages and into the hearts of our readers.


    Title: The Balancing Act of First Chapters
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    Length: 1- 2 hours (flexible)

  • Why back story is deadly and yet some may be crucial
  • Finding the right balance of characterization and plot
  • Opening and ending with hooks
  • When people talk ... we listen (How the lack of dialogue can kill a beginning.)
  • With over fifty contest placements, before her recent sale of four single title romances in a single day, Christie Craig is getting close to mastering that all-important blend of what makes a great first chapter. In a fun-filled workshop, Christie will explain why the balance of characterization and plot is crucial to first chapters. She'll give examples of what makes a good hook and offer tips of how the use of dialogue and tension keep a reader turning pages.


    Title: Build a Character, Build a Book.
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    You've mastered writing, and finally have a grasp on story development, but those rejections haven't stopped. Without a strong character to hold up your plot and prose, a book can, and probably will, fail.

    Come hear New York Times author, Christie Craig, author of thirty-nine books, a proclaimed character-driven writer, do an in-depth talk about how plot, setting, and conflict can and mayve should start in the building-character stage of writing.

    She'll offer tips on: how to make your characters jump off the page and into the hearts of your readers. How to make them lovable—even when they're bad. How to plagiarize from your own life to offer richness to your scenes. Goals, flaws, fears, conflicts, plot development, setting, even dialogue, it all stems from character. Using simple techniques, she teaches how to create engaging characters that are the building blocks in which a whole novel can be developed.

    After giving your brain a workout, this southern spitfire, who has received thousands of rejections, is gonna give the waning writer in you a good swift kick in the pants.

    Entertain, Educate and Motivate, this is one workshop every writer will not want to miss.


    Title: Empowering Emotion: Ten Ways to Make a Reader Care More
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    No matter how great your plot, how cute your characters, or how scary or sexy your book is, if the readers don't care, you'll get pushed into the to-finish-later pile and probably never get pulled out or placed in the keeper shelf. Come hear New York Times Bestselling author, Christie Craig, AKA C.C. Hunter speak on ten techniques of empowering emotion. Using simple techniques, some seen in movies, some used in novels, she'll offer simple tips to create and build more emotion on the page.

    • 1. Pebbles—giving an inanimate object emotional significance to a character
    • 2. Touch Stones—using a part of the setting to build tension and show the scene’s mood
    • 3. Visual cues—using ordinary everyday snapshots of life to stir a characters vulnerabilities, fears, and old hurts
    • 4. Gotta Love ‘Em moments—having a character act or react in ways that make them heroes
    • 5. Break a personal Rule—showing a character when he/she is forced to change their moral compass or take a risk in a way they wouldn’t have done.
    • 6. Take something away—be it a physical object or an internal power, losing something we depend on ratchets up the emotion.
    • 7. Universal Emotions—tapping into the hallmark of emotional cues
    • 8. First Times—any first in our lives is an opportunity show emotion, courage, and weaknesses
    • 9. Last Times—last times experiences can tap into the emotional veins of our characters and readers
    • 10. Upping the Emotional Quotient in Motivation: Adding or increasing an emotional stimulus to your characters goals is a pathway to emotion.

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