Meets: 2nd Tuesdays, June-Nov, 5:30-7:30p CST / 6:30-8:30p EST
Instructor: Susanna Daniel
Location: virtual
Cost: $695
Enrollment: 6 openings
“You’ve just been a fantastic inspiration to me. I really can’t begin to say how much I appreciate your encouragement and help. I would not have committed to my novel without your support.”
This monthly workshop offers accountability, encouragement, and craft-based guidance as you draft your novel or memoir. We’ll start out talking developing sustainable goals, then move on to crafting an effective beginning, building characters, structuring your messy middle, making a great climax, and bringing resolution.
Unlike a deep-dive workshop, we’ll focus not on the pages you’ve written but on your process, craft, characters, decisions, and obstacles. Each month, we’ll use guided exercises to develop pages, scenes, characters, and plot points. During each meeting, each writer will have the opportunity to share obstacles and progress and goals, as well as 10 pages of fresh work. We’ll take turns offering concrete praise, suggestions, and encouragement. We’ll also talk nuts-and-bolts of your ongoing plot and character choices, and offer a forum for testing your ideas.
Experience level: The craft skills we’ll cover in this workshop apply to writers of all experience levels, whether this is your first book or your tenth. Come with as little as an idea for a book, and we’ll help you overcome the hurdles that have kept you from writing until now.
Effort level: Moderate. Unlike our yearlong book class, which is an intense time commitment, you’ll focus on your own writing without the requirement (or the advantages) of fully reading your classmates’ work as they write it.
Media: Online. We’ll meet on Zoom and between meetings use Discord to swap stories and participate in collective writing sprints.
Participants: Limited to 8, to encourage investment in each writer’s work and process. Writers of fiction and memoir are equally welcome.
By the end of our time together, you’ll have a strong structural and character-level foundation, a third to half of your finished draft, and a plan for how to proceed. Most of all, we’ll get you off to your most promising start and set you up to finish strong.
Please note that in November, we will meet one week early, on Nov 14, 2024.