At the heart of every memorable narrative are characters that snap, crackle and pop on the page. Good characters, bad characters, heroes and villains, all must spring into three-dimensional life. In this workshop designed for prose writers at all levels, you will be asked to bring a 500-800 word...

This advanced prose workshop is intended for students who’ve completed a draft, or a substantial portion of a draft, of a novel or longform work of nonfiction, be it memoir or narrative. It’s designed to answer the question: I’ve come this far, so now what? To begin, we will consider up to 15 pages...

Free-writing is, most often, how we honor an impulse to write, during which that impulse either catches fire or peters out. Many writers know this, but few approach free-writing as a practice , one with a wide range of methods and purposes. There are, in other words, as many ways to fill a blank...

Every writer has overwhelming subjects—the places, events, people, themes, or parts of ourselves that pursue us or elude us or keep us up at night. Maybe we’ve tried to write something umpteen times, and keep hitting a wall. Or maybe we never try, unsure of how to enter, or what we might find there...

In this workshop, we will explore various ways to unify a short story collection, focusing on character development, imagistic patterns, and narrative tensions both within each story and between stories. Linked story collections depend on parallels and contrasts, repetitions and surprises to create...

A teasing, slightly elliptical way of saying “yes,” a loaded gesture, an enigmatic smile, a picture in place of a thousand words: the meaning of a story doesn’t have to be spelled out in black and white, and shouldn’t be; at the heart of showing, instead of telling, is leaving readers something to...

This workshop is designed for fiction writers who are familiar with the workshopping process, who feel comfortable with at least some of the craft elements, and who have work they would like to keep revising. The class will give constructive feedback on new manuscripts, highlighting what is working...

Yes! It’s back again! The popular Promptapalooza prompt-a-thon promises to stock you with enough fresh material for 10 narrative essays, stories, or even a book, to flesh out over the months following the class. In an invigorating, supportive, no-pressure environment, we’ll use tested and effective...

Vivian Gornick once wrote about what she called “The Situation” and “The Story” in narrative writing projects. As Gornick put it, “[e]very work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that...

For writers who have taken a number of writing courses and have been practicing and honing their craft for a while, there may come a point when they feel ready to have the world read their work. But how do we get our manuscripts ready? And what is the right way to submit our work for consideration...

W. Somerset Maugham has said that there are three rules to writing a novel but that, unfortunately, no one knows what they are. We might safely assume, though, that one of these rules might have something to do with plot: Maybe we should have one in our novels? Maybe it would be helpful to plan the...

Virginia Woolf challenged future writers to break the sequence of traditional narrative so it might better convey the true stories of women’s bodies. This challenge has been taken on, not only by women, but by queer writers, writers of color, and writers living in differently abled bodies...