Book Club Workshop: Novels by Poets
Update 10/23/24: The Fall 2024 session of Book Club Workshop has ended. If you’d like to be notified of future Book Club Workshop sessions or other course offerings, please let me know here. Thank you!
You’ve honed your skills at dialogue, sensory details, and giving your characters distinct personalities. But how do these elements work together? What do they all add up to, and where are they going? And how do you make a reader care?
How does anyone write a novel that moves, and that feels moving?
In my years as an acquiring editor for an indie press and through my work with private clients, I’ve read hundreds of manuscripts (with beautiful prose and witty, charming characters!) whose plot points and epiphanies fail to make an impact. These promising manuscripts are missing what I call the “tiny propulsion machine.” With a more methodical approach to structure—installing this tiny machine—authors can facilitate specific reader expectations, hopes, and fears, so that readers feel satisfied or devastated when these expectations are later met or subverted.
I can practically hear some literary writers groaning at the thought of any structure “formulas” for fiction, but as we’ll see in these two novels, there are so many different ways to cherry-pick and remix existing plot and genre tropes to ground readers through the phantasmagoria of your unique book. With these guideposts in place, readers won’t wonder “Why am I being shown this?” or “What did that have to do with everything else?”
Why focus on novels by poets?
Novels by poets are fun and surprising! They have unusual approaches to form and/or “reality” while using clear structural choices to cue readers in to what’s important and urgent. And poets are devoted to “the turn” (or “volta”), the moment in a poem that changes our understanding of everything else in the poem. In structuring their work around these turns, poets generate a tiny machine in every poem, each with its own personality and internal logic. Adopting this playful, varied poet-focus toward structure will help you devise tiny machines for your next novel, and all the ones after that.
Note: you don’t need to be a poet to participate! This class is for fiction writers and the fiction-writing-curious.
What happens in this class?
Over three months, we’ll concurrently read the novels Monarch by Candice Wuehle and Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, comparing their different approaches at essential junctures: opening chapters, early-book exposition, inflection point, late-book exposition, climax, and resolution (that’s denouement for you fancypantses).
Supplementing with info from John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story as well as the different narrative shapes explored in Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, we’ll develop a shared language to identify and explain: What craft choices did each author make and what effects do they have on me as a reader? Identifying those causes and effects in these novels, we can develop personal toolkits for outlining our own books.
Here’s the “book club” component: in each class, we’ll discuss our general impressions and observations from the reading, and identify craft choices, their effects, and how they guide our understanding of the relationships between past events and future possibilities in an engaging way.
Here’s the “workshop” component: informed by our readings and discussions, each participant will draft an outline for their own novel, adding and adjusting class by class, with in-class feedback.
Class meets on Zoom every other Tuesday from August 13th through October 22nd, from 7:00 – 8:30 pm Eastern time. Special guests Candice Wuehle and Melissa Lozada-Oliva will attend our final class meeting.
You will leave class with: the ability to conceptualize any future novel projects from an outline, and/or to apply an outline to a more seat-of-the-pants written draft, as a tool for revision!
If you’re planning to participate in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge this year, you’re in luck: you can outline to your heart’s content through late October, when this class ends, in time to bang out your actual full draft beginning November 1st. (Outlining before the start date is fair ’n square.) Also, as novelist Katharine Schellman says, “a plan is not a prison”!
Required texts:
Recommended texts:
Who are you?
Before my years acquiring and editing books for Soft Skull Press and coediting the Best Debut Short Stories anthology series for Catapult, I solicited and edited fiction for Catapult magazine and helmed the then-new Original Fiction section of The Rumpus, as Fiction Editor from 2015 – 2017, and before that, as Assistant Fiction Editor, starting in 2013. At The Rumpus, I published authors including Brandon Taylor, Julia Phillips, Ruth Madievsky, and Maggie Tokuda-Hall before their first novels, and selected two debut stories that later won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Before that, I worked with tween-age novelists through Society of Young Inklings, a nonprofit for young writers. For more info, see my Editing CV here. In addition to over a decade working with fiction writers, I’m a poet with two chapbooks out, and work in ZYZZYVA, HAD, Dream Pop, and elsewhere. My full-length poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, will be out in February from Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press.