A Workshop with Catherine Ryan Hyde 

On April 24-25, 2010 I attended an intensive workshop on Self-Editing with Catherine (Pay it Forward and 17 other novels, to date.)  


You’d think it would be grueling after 16 hours, but honestly, I left feeling energized and inspired.   


Seven of us met in her Cambria studio with our first 30 pages of a work-in-progress, and we dove right in to an in-depth critique for all.  


Catherine read the material aloud (noting that we’ll hear it the way it presents on the page and not the way we would dramatize it for our audience – true and so beneficial.)  


Each of us received a good solid hour and 45 minutes worth of devoted attention from the room.  We covered everything from the broader issues of substance:  Did the piece start where it needed to?  Were we hooked?  Were there points of confusion? -- to sentence structure, grammar and punctuation, and many topics in between.  Any and all questions were posed and answered.  


Catherine’s studio is delightful, the pace of the process moved comfortably, and while we writers were seriously focused, the ambiance was blissfully casual.  The enthusiasm was high, the pressure was low.  


Catherine’s expertise is abundant and she is a supportive and generous teacher.  She periodically offers workshops and says she is open to requests for them on a variety of topics.  

Catherine can be reached via her website, 

www.catherineryanhyde.com