On Saturday, October 3, 2026, I attended the 2026 Pocono Writers’ Workshop presented by the Pocono Liars Club & The Eastern Monroe Public Library. It featured four presentations and was facilitated by Michael Ventrella. Amazingly, the event was free to attend with pre-registration required due to space limitations. Despite that it was a manageable number of participants for an interactive workshop format allowing everyone to be as engaged as they were comfortable with.
Sally Grotta opened with Beyond the First Draft, which was focused on editing after writing. This session was complimented by Roseann Brooks’ Editing Your Own Work. Grotta’s exercises were more focused on ‘balancing’ your writing by ensuring that a strong dialogue doesn’t fail to depict the surroundings and senses as an example. She opened by emphasizing how hard it is to edit one’s own work and suggested taking a break and trying to return to work you’ve over-focused on for a long time with fresh eyes.
She also mentioned to be aware of physical placement of people and objects, not necessarily to step by step explain how they get there and where they are, but not to accidentally jar the reader by having them in one place at one point and another place later with no idea how they got there. A side tip she provided was that right now agents were not favorable to prologues, instead preferring that content be incorporated into the story and if it can’t by why do you want to share it?
Brooks also emphasized taking a break from your own work and step away. She spoke to the types of editing – developmental, copy, and proofreading. As a practical tip she suggested reading it aloud as a means to catch pacing issues and awkward or missing words. In addition to the types of editing she included when each type of editing should occur in the process.
Karen Heuler talked about utilizing tropes and logically began with what is a trope? Essentially tropes are familiarities. They are stories we relate to because they are common. She talked about common ones, particularly in fairy tales and why those work and how they could be reimagined. This led to reimaginations such as Romeo and Juliet and West Site Story.
Victoria Lees addressed pitching to magazines, primarily from the perspective of article writing and noted the current need for content given online sites.
I do admit to hoping for rain on days when I know I’ll be inside all day and while the weather outside turned out to be gorgeous, it was well worth my time. Well done by the Liar’s Club and Library for making it available to everyone.
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