Join us for a special writing workshop this National Novel Writing Month that examines how we build narrative urgency into our stories. Our job as writers of fiction, non-fiction, and scripts is to develop three-dimensional characters who struggle to achieve goals against all sorts of obstacles. In the pursuit of these goals, our characters grow and develop, creating an emotionally satisfying story for our readers and audiences. In this workshop, we will use story-building tools and case studies to discuss how characters and events collide to form a story, how to generate the necessary conflict in our stories, and how to build toward satisfying endings.

Maury Zeff is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright. His work has been published in American Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, Southern California Review, and elsewhere and his plays have been performed throughout the United States and in Europe. He was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize in fiction, won the 2021 Clark-Gross Award in the Novel, and was a finalist for the 2022 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the Acacia Fiction Prize. He has received writing commissions and fellowships from PlayGround, the SF Olympians, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto, where he works and teaches writing. Maury earned an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.