Have you ever struggled to keep to wordcount limits? Ever been frustrated with your sentence structures? Feel like you could polish your paragraphs? Had feedback about prose being “baggy” or “clunky”? Would you like some new tools in your writer’s kit to help you?

This workshop is for writers who want to create crisp and active sentences while imparting depth to setting and character without wasting words. Useful in stories of any length, we’ll critically examine routine advice like “use fewer adverbs”, then go beyond into techniques that help your prose leap off the page.

Over the two hours of tutorial we’ll cover non-prescriptive ways to look at line editing your own work. Lots of examples, and (optional) short exercises for you to test it all out. Bring something to write on – pad and pen or computer as you prefer – and at the end you can download a copy of the notes for future reference. For any level of writer, even the pros who just want to keep exercising their editing muscles.

E.M. Faulds won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2023 for “Under the Moon: Collected Speculative Fiction”. She has been published in Strange Horizons, Shoreline of Infinity, and ParSec magazines. She’s a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle and her story “The Amelioration of Existence in Spite of Truth and Reconciliation” was included in The Best of British Science Fiction 2022. She’s edited two anthologies, the second of which will be launching at Worldcon this year.

Any queries, please contact Pam via email: onlineevents@britishfantasysociety.org