Session I: October 4, 2025, 9a-12p CST / 10-1p EST
Session II: October 11, 2025, 9a-12p CST / 10-1p EST
Instructor: Susanna Daniel
Location: Attend in person or via Zoom
Cost: $95 per session (attend Session I or both sessions)
Enrollment: waitlist
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
All books start somewhere.
Maybe you have little more than a vague idea, an opening image, or a character or subject.
Together, we’ll grow your seedling into a first scene, a series of actionable steps, and a map to the finish line.
During Session I, we’ll:
Define your book’s audience and purpose.
Determine your inciting incident and 2-3 turning points.
Choose your point of view, setting, and clock.
Plan a realistic personal writing schedule and 3 firm deadlines.
During Session II, we’ll:
Draft a logline to help guide you.
Develop your main and supporting characters.
Look ahead to the messy middle and revision.
Find your opening scene and write it. 30m
Meant for novelists and memoirists and suitable for writers of all levels of experience, whether you’ve never written or have published widely.
Bring your preferred writing tools and a spirit of determination and openness. I’ll have coffee and light snacks for those who attend in person; writers who attend by Zoom will be afforded the same attention as everyone else.
Over the past decade-plus of guiding writers, I’ve developed a nuts-and-bolts, encouraging approach that combines practical tips with supportive, actionable feedback. Expect a collaborative, warm atmosphere, smart prompts, and relatable examples.
This class is set at a maximum of 7 writers, to keep the group intimate and productive.
Writers who finish both sessions are invited to continue with the Fall Book Incubator, an accountability group, or Book in a Year, a deep-dive workshop, for 25% off.
ABOUT SUSANNA
Susanna Daniel’s third novel, Girlfriending, will be published in February of 2026 by Third Rail Press. Girlfriending is a spinoff of her story, “The Goddess of Illicit Choices,” which won the 2024 Zona Gale award for short fiction.
Her debut novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the 2011 PEN/Bingham prize, and my second novel, Sea Creatures, was a Target Book Club pick. She’s a graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has earned fellowships at theUW Institute for Creative Writing, UCross Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and her work has been published widely.