May 2025 Workshop
Bloopers and Spit Takes: Easy Ways to Add Humor into Your Creative Writing
Instructor: Onicia Muller
Start Date: Monday, May 5, 2025
End Date: Friday, May 16, 2025
Duration: 2 Weeks
Type: Groups.io
USD Fee: A2P Member – $5; Non-A2P Member – $15
Class Description
Bloopers and Spit Takes: Easy Ways to Add Humor into Your Creative Writing
Anyone can be funny. We all possess comedic personas and styles. This course teaches how to tap into your natural comedic gifts and joke theory to help you improve your comedic batting average.
Developed during 4 years of writing a weekly humor column, writer and comedian Onicia Muller teaches how to infuse humor into creative writing. This technique builds on theories by Jerry Corley (Breaking Comedy’s DNA), John Vorhaus (The Comic Toolbox), Suzette Martinez Standring (The Art of Column Writing), and other comedy, humor and improv resources she’s studied during her 10+ years as a humorist.
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- Class 1: Discovering humor around and in you
Learn how to spot all the ways humor appears in media and art. You’ll also learn to recognize and classify your comedic style or persona
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- Class 2: Laugh triggers
Understand the 9 reasons why humans laugh and the various ways we acknowledge that something is humorous.
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- Class 3: Possibilities in Prose
You likely know prose well enough to identify moments for suspense, drama, and teaching. Now learn the possibilities for comedy in prose. Learn where and how to place punchlines, spot opportunities for wordplay, and tap into opportunities to break grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules for comedic effect.
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- Class 4: Joke Theory pt 1
Learn basic joke structure and tools for uncovering comedic perspective.
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- Class 5: Joke Theory pt 2
Building on your knowledge of the underlying framework of most comedic formulas, you’ll be introduced to the 13 joke structures.
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- Class 6: Editing, lessons, and additional resources
Tips for editing comedic writing. You’ll learn how to break said rules to make jokes more explosive. Preview additional resources to learn more about the science behind comedy writing.
Onicia Muller is a Caribbean-born storyteller currently freezing her buns off in Chicago. In 2012, she gave up crime reporting to sling jokes, write scripts, and compose quotable bathroom prose (i.e., funny greeting cards) for American Greetings and Papyrus. Onicia uses her M.F.A. in writing from Northwestern University and B.A. in Marketing and Communication from InHolland University to help creatives bring their projects to life. In 2018, her 4x syndicated weekly humor column, Just Being Funny, earned Onicia a 30 Under 30 award for cultural influence from IGNITE Caribbean.
June 2025 Workshop
Self-Edit Your Story
Instructor: Lynne Pearson
Start Date: Monday, June 2, 2025
End Date: Friday, June 13, 2025
Duration: 2 Weeks
Type: Groups.io
USD Fee: A2P Member – $5; Non-A2P Member – $15
Class Description
Self-Edit Your Story
Whether you intend to be an independent author or seek traditional publishing, your story deserves to go out into the world at its very best. In Self-Edit Your Story, freelance editor and independent author Lynne Pearson guides you through the steps of the revision process to make your manuscript shine.
While writing progresses from sentence to paragraph to scene to story, editing moves from story to scene to sentence, focusing on the big picture first. There is no point in sending a book out into the world that is grammatically correct and free of spelling mistakes if the story doesn’t hold the reader’s attention.
You will learn how to analyze your story from the top down:
Students will learn:
- How to analyze a story chapter by chapter
- How to deconstruct a scene
- How to improve both the content and delivery of a story
Lynne Pearson Lynne Pearson is a freelance fiction editor, a member of the Emerald City Romance Writers (formerly Greater Seattle Romance Writers of America), and was the Emerald City Writers’ Conference 2021 conference chair. She belongs to the Editors’ Association of Earth, and the Northwest Editors Guild. She found her calling in 2015 when she realized she wanted to help writers improve their stories. She earned a Certificate in Editing from the University of Washington and is a lifelong learner. She publishes fun, flirty, feel-good fiction under the name Lynne Hancock Pearson. She contributed to and was the editor of a non-fiction essay collection, Filling the Void; Voices from the None Zone, published by Market Square Books in 2019.
Lynne has woken many a morning with a book hangover.
September 2025 Workshop
Show AND Tell
Instructor: Leslie J. Hall
Start Date: Monday, September 15, 2025
End Date: Friday, September 26, 2025
Duration: 2 Weeks
Type: Groups.io
USD Fee: A2P Member – $5; Non-A2P Member – $15
Class Description
Show AND Tell: A Secret Weapon for Writers
Most writers have heard the advice, “Show, Don’t Tell.” But what does it really mean and how do we use it in our stories? In this workshop, we will review the meaning of Show, Don’t Tell and discuss how this tool helps us connect with readers in a deeper way. We’ll discuss what “tell” looks like and how to change it to “show” using grammar, voice, point of view, and description. We’ll look at Show, Don’t Tell in terms of character and character reactions. This workshop is for any writer in any genre who wants their stories to be tighter and more impactful to their readers.
Students will:
- Understand what the phrase means for their story
- How to identify “telling” prose
- How to convert “telling” to “showing”
- When it is okay to tell
- How to use point of view to heighten Show, Don’t Tell
Leslie J. Hall is the author of the Kaitlyn Willis Road Signs mysteries, a humorous, PG-rated, amateur sleuth series starring a NW code enforcement officer. Her short story, A Strange Rain, will appear in Better Off Dead: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Elton John and Bernie Taupin anthology in December 2025. She also writes women’s fiction. Leslie loves to speak, teach, and share her passion for writing with others. When not writing, Leslie volunteers for writer-related events, leads Write Night (a weekly virtual facilitated critique group), teaches beginning writing at community colleges in continuing ed, and when not doing all of that, hangs out at the beach with a book (or 2!). She lives in Bremerton, WA, with her husband and her pandemic rescue cat, Mia.