Meets: 3rd Thurs, Oct-Mar 2025, 530-730p
Instructor: Susanna Daniel
Location: live on Zoom
Cost: $675
Enrollment: 3 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.
In addition to our six live classes, members of the group will have access to the first half of Write Your Novel, a yearlong, self-paced course filled with mindset and mechanics advice, as well as weekly Co-writing Sessions.
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: 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.
“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.”