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Let’s Get Organized: How to Create a Simple Visual Book Outline (Halifax) with Gina N. Brown

You’ve got great ideas for a book, right? You’re raring to go, and now you’re staring at a blank page wondering how on earth to get started. For some writers, the biggest hurdle is the in-between stage, when many story ideas, characters, plotlines and details are floating around in their heads. Worse, they are unsure how to organize them or keep track of them. If this sounds familiar, you may benefit from a big-picture outline. In this workshop, writer and publisher Gina N. Brown will present an easy (and fun!) way to capture your book project on a single page through a visual process called mind mapping. Using examples from her own writing projects, she’ll show you how to set up any fiction or nonfiction book project.

About the instructor: Gina N. Brown has written two novels set in Nova Scotia, Lucy McGee’s Moment of Truth (2021) and The Sugar Bowl Feud (2024). After a career as a marketing specialist, she has worked as a freelance writer of travel, memoir, and lifestyle articles. Her writing has been published in The Globe and Mail, Canadian Living, The Chronicle Herald, and SaltWire. In 2020, she founded NovaHeart Media, an independent publishing platform. A Halifax resident, Brown is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Participant cap: 25

Location: BMO Community Room of Halifax Central Library (5440 Spring Garden Rd, Halifax)
     [This library is a wheelchair-accessible venue with all-gender washrooms.]

Date of workshop: Saturday, Oct 11 (2:15pm to 3:00pm)

Participation is free

  • Pre-registration (up to 15 per workshop) is open to WFNS members and non-members alike.
  • Walk-in participants (at least 10 per workshop) will be welcomed on a first-come-first-served basis. Stop by the BMO Community Room (2nd floor, Halifax Central Library) to see if space is available.

Pre-registration for this workshop is closed, but more than 10 walk-in seats remain!

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Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and young adults, and others) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca