The Muse & the Marketplace 2017

Students in this session will engage with a writer who has had success re-imagining personal experience and engaging with contemporary issues to craft powerful narratives. The goal is for students to gain insight from hearing about Jabari's creative process and better understand how personal experience and passion for one's subject influences both content and execution of a creative work.

Jabari Asim writes from two impulses: the first is to indulge his curiosity, to use a book as a convenient excuse to explore in depth a subject that he wants to learn about. The second is to set the record straight: to add his voice to the chorus of resistance that forms a counter-narrative to the prevailing myths about the ethnic group to which he belongs, as they have journeyed from property, to 3/5 of a human being, to embattled citizens of these United States. There's an old proverb that observes, "Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." Jabari Asim would like to think that, in his own small way, he speaks for the lions.

Do you enjoy reading humorous writing and want to make your own work funnier? Humorous writing, like maple syrup, is wonderful to consume and lots of work to produce. What are the building blocks of humor? And how do we incorporate humor into our writing without making it too "jokey"? We'll look at examples from the masters in fiction and nonfiction, explore what makes them succeed, identify their techniques and learn how to incorporate these techniques into our own work. Come with a short excerpt of writing (500 words or less) that you'd like to improve. We'll do an in-class exercise then pick one or two to workshop as a group.

When you sit down at your desk to write, does self-doubt get in your way? Are you afraid to call yourself a writer? Are you constantly questioning the value of what you've written? Does fear keep you from editing and sending out your work?

Fear is a roadblock that all writers have to climb over to keep going, but there are tools to get over that block. In this class, we'll use self-confidence tips from Elizabeth Gilbert, Karen Russell, and Kanye West. We will learn how to embrace failure and to learn the importance of celebrating every single writing success. We will learn to have a little fun with it.

As readers, we simply want to sit back and enjoy a well-told story. We usually don’t think about what’s going on ‘under the hood.’ But as writers, we need to understand how each scene operates—we need to know what’s working (so we don’t change it) and what isn’t so we can effectively revise. In this session we’ll go through 9 steps to analyzing scenes, from places where tension can be amplified, to places where pacing needs to slow in order to give the reader the best possible ‘trip.’ We’ll examine the scenes of established writers using these methods, with the goal of providing new tools that you can apply to your fiction.

You know you’re reading a great mystery novel when you’re up at three in the morning, unable to put it down.  When you finally get to sleep, the characters go romping around in your dreams.  You get to the final pages and smack yourself in the head because the solution is a complete surprise, and yet so obvious in retrospect.  This workshop session will demystify the art and artifice and get down to the nuts and bolts of writing a killer mystery novel.