Events

An overview of how climate fiction challenges our assumptions, decenters our perspectives and expands the limits of what we believe. This class serves as an intro to Rewriting Utopias.

Learn the fundamentals: how to think about writing video games, the place of player agency, the basics of narrative branching, how to build your portfolio, and what should go in it.

A two-session workshop designed to inspire writers at all levels to craft speculative cli-fi that embodies hope and justice, creating worlds that acknowledge historical wrongs while amplifying those voices and perspectives that continue to be most affected by systems of oppression.

Do you love horror? Historical fiction? Do you think they would go great together? Spoiler alert: they do. This introduction to historical horror covers what it is, who’s writing it, and how you can get started writing your own.

Explore creating suspense with stories told through journal entries, letters, social media posts, transcripts, newspaper clippings, and captain's logs.

For beginning to advanced writers, this workshop focuses on showing how essential time, place, and social setting can be to crafting an effective horror story.

A discussion-based and writing practice workshop for beginners and experimental writers. The workshop explores world building in horror stories, and employs horror’s ability to offer social critique of anti-Blackness

A lecture and Q&A for beginning and intermediate writers, this class will cover what hacking or system cracking is, what it isn’t, and how to portray it in your fiction in a way that pleases layfolk and experts.

In this three session workshop, writers will learn how to apply Design Thinking principles to predict the future in their worldbuilding.

This six-session generative workshop will provide writers with a framework for writing a de-capitalizing future that finds its roots in an actively decolonial past. Taking on the call as sci-fi and speculative fiction writers to create the world we want to exist in, this class will explore the question, how do we write into that future the liberation that indigenous and ex-colonized ancestors fought for.

In this two-part generative workshop, writers will explore their cultural storytelling traditions and then apply them to their own work.

Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

For advanced beginner and intermediate writers, this three session class will explore how to adapt plotting techniques and outlining strategies for writers who HATE plotting and outlining but love complicated stories.

Register for this class before 3pm Pacific by emailing helpdesk@clarionwest.org.

Whether you are an improviser or an outliner or something in between, this three session class will help you heighten reader interest by examining more than the Hero's Journey, or the three or five-act story structure.