Book Club Workshop: Novels by Poets (asynchronous class version)
Book Club Workshop: Novels by Poets (asynchronous class version)
Note: This is the at-your-own-pace version of the class, with discussions and assignments posted on Google Classroom. There is no live Zoom component. (For the live Zoom class, click here.)
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?
In this class, we’ll study structure more broadly, and read and discuss two novels by poets, to find out. (You don’t need to be a poet to participate! This class is for fiction writers and the fiction-writing-curious.)
If you’d prefer to pay over monthly installments, please reach out via the contact page.
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? Once we can identify those causes and effects in these novels, we can develop personal toolkits for outlining our own books.
Here’s the “book club” component: every other week, via Google Classroom, 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, turning in each update for feedback.
Lectures and discussions are posted every other Wednesday from August 14th through October 23rd. (There is no author visit for this version of the class, but students will have the opportunity to write questions for Candice Wuehle and Melissa Lozada-Oliva to answer.
For more info, please see this longer course description.
After signup, you will receive a welcome email with the syllabus and classroom link.