Don’t Work Too Hard! An Advanced Fiction Workshop

The number one thing I hear from my writing students is that they want “accountability”—in other words, they want to be forced to get writing done. And yet, while writing workshops provide helpful deadlines, they can also paralyze creativity. Workshops are often where fiction can start to feel like “work.” Once it’s time to listen to and incorporate feedback, the next stage of writing can feel daunting, and the excitement that led you to produce a piece of work might feel unavailable, or worse, crushed.

This class takes as its starting point the idea that writing should never be a slog, and that playful creativity has a place at every stage of the drafting process. With group writing sessions in the mornings and workshops in the evening, we’ll blur the line between the creative stage and the editing stage. While you may inevitably find your writing responding to workshop discussions, this writing time is unstructured—you might use this time to continue working on a long-term project, break the seal on a new one, play around with craft tools we talked about in class, or respond to a writing prompt (of which I have many).

In this workshop, we’ll strive to create an environment of inquiry and generosity, so that each writer emerges from the workshop looking forward to the possibilities of revision. We’ll continuously ask, where do we as readers feel the energy in a piece of fiction? Where did you, the writer, feel most locked in while writing it? What feels most challenging and why? How can those challenges feel less intimidating—less like “work”? How can you stay in touch with the spark of energy that compelled you to write in the first place?

This is an advanced class best suited to fiction writers with some workshop experience.