John Boyne wrote The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in less than three days. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. About his process, Ishiguro explained, “The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere—I let them remain and ploughed on.” By examining the fast-drafting process of established writers, this course will teach you how to silence the inner critic and accept imperfection as a necessary part of writing the first draft of any book. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction or working on a novel or memoir, this course will teach you how to write as quickly and imperfectly as possible. You can expect short lectures on fast drafting, including but not limited to where to begin, how to outline and prepare, how to set your word count and deadlines, and how to overcome mental obstacles. You should also expect to complete in-class exercises or writing prompts and engage in partner or group discussions that strengthen your understanding of fast drafting. By the end of this course, you’ll have learned fast drafting techniques to help jumpstart a new writing project or reignite enthusiasm for a languishing manuscript. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

In his essay, “The Triggering Town,” Richard Hugo suggests that certain subjects inspire us to turn our attention to the music and play of language. In this weekend workshop, I propose we spend time discussing how our own triggering subjects—memories, places glimpsed in passing, an aroma that takes us back years, for example—might lead us forward in our own writing. We will begin our weekend by discussing the process by which such triggers prompt the imagination, the need to find words in response, and the desire to "fashion a text," as Annie Dillard says. I will share a few prompts, poems, and exercises that might “trigger” imaginative possibilities for your poems and prose (both new and in process) as well as suggest ways to develop your work. There will be time for writing in and out of class and sharing where these exercises have led you. Bring short pieces you have started, or attend simply to generate new material. By Sunday, I hope that we can share our work with each other and serve as a sympathetic and thoughtful audience. Our goal will be to discover new possibilities for our essays and poems, to come away with new material, and maybe even to discover new approaches to generating our written work. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home.

For writers, getting your work published and recognized is a step toward realizing your goals as an author. However, finding the right contests or publications can be challenging, time consuming, and even mystifying. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll talk through all the joys and perils of the submission process and the world of publishing poetry. We’ll review lists of helpful tips, look at ways to identify and find publishers who might be receptive to your work, practice methods to track and manage your submissions, and even talk about how to deal with rejection. We’ll cover strategies for submitting individual poems to literary journals, as well as strategies for submitting chapbooks and book-length manuscripts for publication, using the features of Submittable, a submission management system for the literary world. There will be a lot of time for questions and discussion, and our workshop will in part be tailored to your curiosities and interests. You'll leave armed with tools to identify journals and publishers that are a good fit for your work, the know-how to create a personalized submission strategy, and a new confidence in sending your work out for publication.

In an effort to get over ourselves as personal storytellers, we’ll strive in this intensive course to make every sentence, indeed every word, count. What must be there for a reader to get a sense of us? What’s that inciting incident, organizing principle, heat-seeking moment, that could drive our memoirs? We’ll spend Saturday talking about how we all have many memoirs in us, but each needs to be a specific slice—the statue within the block of marble, the sculpture within the lump of clay, the story-within-the-story. What’s this particular memoir about? (“Me” or “My life” aren’t precise enough answers.) We’ll also engage in in-class writing exercises, to see what memories rise to the surface as crucial memoir kernels, and discuss excerpts from published works—by economical personal writers such as Jeannette Walls and Karen Schneider—to energize and inspire us. Overnight, we’ll write our “life stories” in 500 words, allowing the narrower story to start taking shape. Sunday, we’ll share our pieces and workshop them on the spot. Nothing to submit in advance. Open-minded introspectives with a desire to communicate, at all levels of writing experience, are welcome. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

When we write memoir, personal essay, or autofiction, we have to make choices about how to represent our various selves at different moments in time. In order to bring the past alive, it becomes necessary to think of the shifting self as a character. Our task becomes to find ways to represent this self on the page—just as a novelist must do when writing fiction. This attempt plays a role in the choices we make around setting, dramatic movement and tension, voice, narrative distance, and more. In this weekend workshop, you’ll learn from a variety of ways authors have written themselves as characters. We’ll read excerpts from the work of Marguerite Duras, Vivian Gornick, Jamaica Kincaid, and others as we try our hand at a range of strategies. By the end of our weekend, you’ll have lots of material, and you’ll have discovered new ways to represent the self on the page. We will end the weekend with time for everyone to share new work with the group and leave with plenty of ideas for moving forward. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

Just a page or two in length, flash fiction is quick and easy to learn, yet endlessly rich and challenging to write. Flash can be realistic or fantastic, heartfelt or ironic, as simple as a fairytale or as fragmented and allusive as a postmodern novel. Its singular power is the sense of imaginative freedom at its core—the “flash.” World-renowned writers like Kafka and Kawabata have done some of their most evocative work in the genre. This weekend intensive course is designed for writers who want to explore the creative possibilities of flash fiction. We will talk about the origins of flash and how it works, read a variety of published examples, and generate work of our own through in-class and take-home exercises. We will share our writing with the group. Over the weekend, you will write in-class and take-home flash exercises, read published flash fiction, and share work with the group. You’ll learn about the origins and types of flash fiction, the role of conflict in creating story, the power of image and metaphor, and the relationship between text and subtext. By the end of the weekend, you will take away at least two new works of flash fiction, and a list of ideas for ten others. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

There's a particular kind of audacity that writers need—daring to use the closest, most hurtful, most autobiographical portions of what's in your brain, your past, your heart. The things you think you shouldn't touch because they're too dangerous. “It’s absolutely necessary,” said fiction writer Jonathan Franzen, “to say things that are absolutely unsayable. If I’m just writing about something moderately interesting using interesting well-turned sentences, it’s got no life. It’s got to come out of some issue that’s still hot in me, that’s distressing me.” We all have things we are leery of writing about—perhaps because we fear that we could never find the right words, or because we just want to move on already, damn it, or because we’re ashamed and don’t want everybody knowing how base and vile, how absolutely human, we really are. In this class we will begin with exercises aimed at helping us discover what our unsayables are. Fortunately we’ll be writing fiction, so from there we’ll have free reign to change things however we see fit and to use our sense of humor, our obsessions—all the fun stuff as well are the hard stuff. We’ll jot down incidents that have happened to us and incidents we’ve heard about second- or thirdhand that might help transform our unsayables into a story. We’ll try out different ways of doing the transforming. We’ll read some published stories to give us examples of how we might do this. Our unsayables are always with us, no matter how much we’d rather not examine them. Assigning them to characters and who can act them out is a way of turning dross into gold—and for writers, this is the sweetest kind of revenge. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

The personal essay—the most flexible, shapeshifting genre—has much to offer writers. This workshop is designed to educate students about the dynamic possibilities of creative nonfiction while also informing them about the origin of the essay and its demands. When and why do we weave public histories into individual stories? What is the impact of emotional truth versus factual truth? How do we distinguish memoir from autobiography, and the lyric essay from the traditional essay and reportage? What tools do writers have in terms of structure, and how do we use form to enrich any type of material? We’ll look at a range of essays—from the historic to the modern—and seek to understand what defines creative nonfiction in all its permutations. We’ll explore how various writers have navigated its possibilities and discuss ways to experiment with the typologies to create new directions for our own work. Participants will engage in writing prompts that address several experimental forms, including a found essay, a structural challenge, an exercise built around identity, and the use of a listicle to uncover topics that feel daring to the writer. Please come to class ready to write and engage in discussion with classmates. All students will be asked to share in class. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

Romance is one of the most read genres in fiction with a voracious readership. Whether this takes the form of a sweeping romantasy, a Hallmark-ish rom-com, or an action-packed contemporary, there’s one thing every good romance has in common, and that’s well-written chemistry. The draw of a happily ever after is the crux of the romance genre, but romantic relationships exist on the page across the expanse of literature. This class will include an exploration of the facets of creating romantic chemistry on page, including the use of common and not-so-common romance tropes, the role of conflict in romance, how to use dialogue to build on chemistry, the skills needed to write physical intimacy that sparks, and more. This class will be ideal for those beginning or exploring their interest in writing romance and may be very helpful for those hoping to strengthen their skills in writing romantic relationships in other genres. This class will provide an opportunity to share existing work with classmates and to create new work through exercises and assignments. You will leave this class with: An understanding of genre expectations. An introduction to the structure of a romance arc through character and plot. Skills for creating chemistry between love interests. Exercises to build and strengthen romantic relationships in your writing. A roadmap to begin writing your romance (if you’re new to writing in the genre). Denise Williams is the author of ten romance novels and novellas and her work has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, been selected as an Indie Next Pick, highlighted by NPR, The Washington Post, and Good Morning, America, and she’s a Library Reads Hall of Fame author. Denise co-taught a university course on using romance novels to explore social justice concepts and is a regular contributors to Writer’s Digest. More importantly, she’s one of those voracious romance readers and loves love stories. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home. Workshopping time will be limited, but there can be opportunity!

Character is at the heart of most of our work as writers, and characters who are layered and complex not only drive a narrative, but help a reader to invest, engage, and feel emotionally connected to a story. So, how do we create characters who feel real, human, but large enough to give a story the momentum it needs? In this weeklong workshop, we will look at characters who jump off the page across various genres and forms (novels, short stories, and drama) and aim to understand the tools writers use to do this work. What part does dialogue play, and how do we find a character’s voice? What is the relationship between plot and character? How can we build backstories that feel rich and help maintain tension? How do sensory detail, setting, and point of view work to create character? Discussion of texts; a good deal of generative writing in response to prompts; and an exploratory, hands-on approach that borrows techniques from the toolboxes of actors, screenwriters, and playwrights will help us create an array of characters to work with. There will be opportunities to workshop on the fifth day when writers will be invited to share a short, new piece built around one of their new, unforgettable characters. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.