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January 2022
8-Week Online Class: Fresh Approaches to Research to Deepen Your Prose at Catapult
Sometimes writers avoid research, while others might lose themselves in it, using it as a sneaky way to avoid the actual writing. In this class, we’ll aim to navigate between these extremes and find ways to use research to make your writing come more alive. We’ll explore how to take an expansive view of your subject, such as Richard Powers does with trees in The Overstory, how to interweave first-hand sensory experience with history to hold the reader rapt as…
Find out more »February 2022
Writing Long–But Not Long-winded–Sentences at GrubStreet
In our attention-span-challenged times, it takes a certain nerve to write long sentences, yet recent Booker longlisted books include Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, and Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport, all of which revel in them. How do we explain this? Sentence length can seem almost accidental, a byproduct of style or point of view. In this session, though, we’ll bring them to center stage and seek to cultivate sentences that are long but not annoying. Such sentences…
Find out more »Cinefiction: Using Film Technique in Your Fiction at GrubStreet
We've all heard about adaptation, and the phrase, "The book was better than the film" has become something of a cliché. But for those of us who are avid viewers of movies and TV shows, one might wonder what we can learn from directors, screenwriters, cinematographer, and even actors. In this class, we'll go over some basic terms from film technique and theory, and then apply these to the craft of fiction. From characters and dialogue to scene-building, from perspective…
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