Tag: Classes & Workshops

“Authors like Chekhov, Austen, Mansfield, Dickens, Faulkner never studied writing in an academic program. Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing quit school at the age of thirteen. These masters learned craft by analyzing the work of celebrated authors. My advice is to read widely like they did, and notice craft features: word choice, a sentence’s musical replication of a character’s action, the convincing accuracy of an idiosyncratic voice, the tension and pacing of a scene, the symbiotic nature of the story’s elements. When you love something you’ve read, figure out why.” -Nan Cuba

“The writing will never be “done,” so embrace the chaos of highs and lows that come with developing your story into its best possible version. Letting go of perfectionism will make that process easier. ” -Beverly Chukwu

“The key is to rethink revision’s relationship with your practice. When you stop thinking that revision owes you something—a final draft, a sense of completion, a publication—and start thinking about it as a series of opportunities and invitations, you’ll realize just how powerful it is.” -Adam Soto

“I’m hoping what people come away with this time is a bit of grace and forgiveness for how complicated memory really is, and how clever our brains can be with telling us we’ve got the whole truth, when what we’ve got is really a fraction that changes shape. We’re conditioned in this culture to believe that facts will reveal the ‘Truth,’ but I think where memoir really gets interesting is where it allows for slippage, makes room for other interpretations, and invites the reader into the struggle of making meaning from experience rather than telling us the ‘One Right Way’ to see what happened.” -Rachel Starnes

“Writing, as a profession, is all about rejection and self-doubt. Regardless of your accomplishments, these two elements never go away. The way I deal with both is simply by showing up and focusing on the process, not the end result. I write because I love writing, the process of writing.” -Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

“I try to practice gratitude: if I’m feeling down or disempowered about my writing because of rejections or not being as good as I want to be on the page, I ask myself to consider what I can be grateful for in my writing life – and writing this out usually shifts the negative feelings into something that has agency and power. The act of writing moves me out of the passive place of being at the mercy of my feelings.” -Charlotte Gullick

“Don’t quit. Pivot. No agent requesting? Find another way to present your query. Find another aspect of your book to focus on. Maybe even find a new way to start your book… The only way to fail is to quit.” -Deanna Roy

“It’s incredibly helpful to give yourself permission as a writer to simply generate material–and then, at the right moment, when you’ve done the necessary work to get the story on paper, switch over to a more architectural mode and focus primarily on structure.” -Jessica Wilbanks

“After this class, you’ll have a tool box of marketing and publicity skills that you can use throughout your career. These tools are applicable across genres, and are important to have at your disposal whether you’re working with a large publishing team or publishing as an indie author: they’ll help you become adept, empowered, and ready to adapt your marketing and publicity approach to any new publishing project.” -Katharine Duckett

“Writing a query letter can be a gateway to further understanding of your work and a chance to start trying on the role of “author” and everything that comes with it.” -Becka Oliver