Meets: 6 sessions, every other Tuesday 8/4-10/13/2026, 530-730p CT
Instructor: Susanna Daniel
Location: live on Zoom
Cost: $575
Enrollment: 6 openings
This accountability group offers community, encouragement, and craft-based guidance as you draft your novel or memoir. We’ll start by developing sustainable goals, then move on to crafting an effective beginning, building characters, structuring your messy middle, making a great climax, and bringing resolution.
Unlike a deep-dive workshop, we’ll focus not on the pages you’ve written but on your process, craft, characters, decisions, and obstacles. During each meeting, each writer will have the opportunity to share obstacles and progress and goals, as well as a few pages of fresh work. We’ll take turns offering concrete praise, suggestions, and encouragement. We’ll also talk nuts-and-bolts of your ongoing plot and character choices, and offer a forum for testing your ideas.
Experience level: The craft skills we’ll cover in this workshop apply to writers of all experience levels, whether this is your first book or your tenth.
Effort level: Light-moderate. Unlike our yearlong book class, which is an intense time commitment, you’ll focus on your own writing without the requirement (or the advantages) of workshopping your classmates’ work as they write it.
Participants: Limited to 6, to encourage investment in each writer’s work and process. Writers of fiction and memoir of all genres are equally welcome.
By the end of our time together, you’ll have at least a third of your finished draft and a plan for how to proceed. Most of all, we’ll get you off to your most promising start and set you up to finish strong.
About the Instructor
Susanna Daniel is the author of three novels. Girlfriending is a spinoff of her award-winning short story, "The Goddess of Illicit Choices," Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham prize, and Sea Creatures, was a Target Book Club pick.
Susanna is the co-founder of the Madison Writers’ Studio with author Michelle Wildgen. She’s a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Writers’ Workshop and a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the UW Institute for Creative Writing. She’s been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony and UCross, and has been published in the Sewanee Review, Newsweek, Slate, One Story, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Significant Objects, Epoch, and elsewhere. Before co-founding MWS, she taught creative writing at universities for ten years.
You can learn more about Susanna at her website, and you can contact her via email.
“You’ve just been a fantastic inspiration to me. I really can’t begin to say how much I appreciate your encouragement and help. I would not have committed to my novel without your support.”