Author Mindy Friddle will present a creative writing seminar titled Make a Scene Why Don’t you on Tuesday, March 26 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Mahler Room at Tryon Fine Arts Center.

Friddle will help participants transform their writing by increasing their ability to balance dialogue and action with summary and exposition. Friddle will use in-class writing exercises to explore these topics. Additional discussion will include:

• How scenes slow down the action to a single moment or series of moments, and include action, setting and dialogue

• Why scenes help develop character and engage the reader’s emotions

•  How summary sets up scenes with backstory or relevant details

• When to consider using flashbacks and flashforwards

• How your best work sometimes happens in the “spaces” between scenes—what you choose to leave out can add impact to what you include

• Why a thorough knowledge of summary and scene makes revising your writing less daunting and more effective

Mindy Friddle’s first novel, “The Garden Angel” (St. Martin’s Press/Picador), a SIBA bestseller, was selected for Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program in 2004, and was a National Public Radio Morning Edition summer reading pick. Her second novel, “Secret Keepers,” published by St. Martin‘s Press and Picador won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Mindy was awarded a 2008-2009 Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose from the South Carolina Arts Commission and has twice won the South Carolina Fiction Prize. She was named a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Sewanee, Tenn. She graduated from Furman University, and earned an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Greenville where she directs the Writing Room, a community-based nonprofit program she founded in 2006 to bring writers to Greenville for paid seminars and readings.

Friddle’s workshop is the second in a series of three evening creative writing workshops in Tryon presented by Tryon Fine Arts Center in conjunction with Hub City Writer’s Project of Spartanburg. Hub City Writers Project, founded in 1995, has published more than 400 writers and 60 books and is dedicated to nurturing writers in all stages of the writing process through workshops, contests and gatherings, striving to build a community of writers across Upstate South Carolina and beyond.

Tryon Fine Arts Center is a 44-year-old organization that provides opportunities and facilities for the entire Carolina Foothills community in order to advance experience and participation in the arts.

The workshops to be held at TFAC are part lecture, part exercise and will have a limited number of students. The final workshop of the series will be Poetry Writing with author John Lane. Workshops will be held from 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Mahler Room.

For more information about costs or to register, call 828-859-8322 or visit www.tryonarts.org.

– article submitted by Marianne Carruth