Impact Your Reader: Weaving Concrete Description with Abstract Thought

How much of your writing is too abstract? How much concrete detail is too much? And how do you find the balance? Overwhelming the reader with descriptive detail can slow down your writing to the point of tedium, but too much abstraction means writing empty of vivid imagery. We want to appeal to the reader’s five senses while inspiring them to dive into our story. We will also consider how masters of writing style vary sentence structure to weave their words into lyrical rhythm. This class will focus on narrative prose (fiction/nonfiction) but poets are welcome!

Rebecca Snow’sdebut novel, Glassmusic (http://conundrum-press.com/glassmusic/),was released from Conundrum Press in November 2014 and was shortlisted for the 2015 International Rubery Book Award (http://www.ruberybookaward.com/2015-winners.html). Snow was awarded the Robert and Daryl Davis Fellowship in Poetry for the 2015Seaside Writers Conference (http://seasidewritersconference.weebly.com/2015-swc-archives.html), and her poetry has been published in Blue Moon,Pooled Ink, and was recently added to the Denver Poetry Map (http://www.denverpoetrymap.net/?page_id=234). She won first place for narrative nonfiction in the 2007 Writers Studio Contest from Arapahoe Community College and was featured in Progenitor. With an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, Snow teaches English at the Community College of Aurora. She is originally from Seattle and enjoys hiking around the great Rocky Mountains with her son.