Best Novel Writing Courses to Help You Craft a Bestselling Novel We’ve wrapped three weeks on this book, and I’ve taught nine classes with about thirty writers, examining the novel from nearly every craft perspective possible: Plot, voice, POV, and structure while asking through teacherly questions like: Can we find a hero in a book with twelve characters? Can we find a plot from the deck of plots we study? Is there a structure that adheres to the three part form? But this was also a teaching...
Best Creative Writing Classes Online: Write With Purpose & Passion In a class, quite recently, I signed into the Zoom call late and those already present were deep into a Covid discussion. Usually, I start class with upbeat music and silly dance moves—my on-line equivalent of the sage smudging techniques you might find in Native American traditions or in many spiritual communities—but as I increased the volume, the tide of conversation increased too, in volume and misery and division and...
Nurturing Your Creative Voice Through Intentional Reading – Virtual Writing Classes Redefining the Canon for Your Needs From ThoughtCo: “In fiction and literature, the canon is the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre. The collected works of William Shakespeare for instance, would be part of the canon of western literature, since his writing and writing style has had a significant impact on nearly all aspects of that genre.” I have a personal...
Fragments: Courses in Creative Writing With Handout A short post, but a good one with the meat in the actually recording from class. This was pre-pandemic and I hope you enjoy a vintage class! We spent a week discussing fragments at the Studio, and it was such a good conversation that I decided to create a small teaching for those of you who are not in class with us. To help you get the most out of it, there is a handout that you can print. You must click on the link and then download the...
Lit Lesson on Getting an Agent: Best Writing Classes Though publishing ins’t, and shouldn’t be, the primary measure of artistic worth, it goes a long way toward affirming one’s status as a writer. ~ C. Michael Curtis, Publishers and Publishing. On Writing Short Storiesedited by Tom Bailey Studio III’s Becky Ellis secured a literary agent for her first memoir with the working title: At War with my Father. This posting in a Q & A format is about how she went about the...
Defamiliarization refers to a writer’s taking an everyday object that we all recognize and, with a wave of his or her authorial magic wand, rendering that same object weirdly unfamiliar to us—strange even. Presto change-o, our perspective shifts and we see the object in a new way. A pretty neat magic trick, if you ask us. The word defamiliarization was coined by the early 20th-century Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in his essay “Art as Technique.” He argued that...
