This course will use as its basis my craft book, Turning Life into Fiction , which has been in print for thirty years (though it’s not necessary to purchase the book). As the title suggests, our week will focus on the transformation process needed to take a real event and turn it into compelling...

A clock ticks inside every story. The clock might measure a decade, a day, or a single moment. Your story’s clock might not even look like a clock. Your clock might be a river, a tree, or a rock reflecting years of erosion. To locate your story's clock is no small thing, because it means unlocking...

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...

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...

This workshop is designed for students writing their first novel (or short story) or those who are starting the next one. Purposefully crafted for beginning and intermediate writers, Fiction Bootcamp is created specifically for writers who are fuzzy about where to begin, what do to next, and how to...

A writer’s voice may be the most vital part of style—and the most mysterious. In this workshop, we’ll explore the formal building blocks of voice (syntax, diction, point of view) and aspects that are more nebulous (tone, implication, patterns of thinking). We’ll consider questions such as: How can...

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...

We often think of literary settings as vast natural landscapes or bustling urban backdrops, but some of our most human stories take place in everyday, domestic settings. A yellow kitchen table, an old reclining chair, a child’s broken toy, or a door burst open can each give readers a sense of...

If you’ve already written the better part of a novel—or maybe even completed a rough draft—chances are there’s still a lot to do before it’s ready to submit to an agent or publisher. In this class, we’ll focus on the revision process, with a heavy emphasis on your first thirty pages and overall...

All of us encounter dramas in life that seem tailor-made for narrative. But when sitting down to pen such seeming “ready-mades,” we often find that they don’t come to life, drag, or simply seem to lose their once-brilliant shine when committed to paper. So, we ask, how do writers such as Bill Bryson...