The Workshops:
Bad Story Guru Medicine is a series of (two) workshops on recognising and doing something about craft misinformation. Most Story Gurus give storytelling advice that is full of misleading ideas about creativity and the way the world works. To stop the cycle, we’ll go through common tactics used and ways to intervene. The goal of the workshops is to stop spreading misinformation ourselves, be free to draw inspiration from any source without taking on the counter-productive ideas, develop our unique storytelling gifts, enable skills in deliberate meaning design, and nurture a world where good medicine is the default.
Workshop 1: Tactics 1 + 2
Workshop 2: Tactics 3 + 4
Check out the preparation reading for this workshop
Who This Is For:
* Writers (and any designers) of any artform
* Educators
* Researchers
* Anyone interested!
What I’m Drawing On:
I draw on personal experience, professional experience, inoculation research, as well as research into story guru tactics (my own analysis from my written-but-not-released-book, published research from screenwriting scholars, rhetorical studies, hype studies, critical creative writing pedagogy, etc), as well as liberatory craft processes, your contributions, and more! A big thank you to my super helpful format testers, including John Willoughby — who tested a couple of iterations! 🙂
How to cite this page:
Dena, Christy (2026) “Bad Story Guru Medicine,” Next World Narrative, 12 May. www.nextworldnarrative.org/events/bad-story-medicine/.