The Creative Word
Online writing seminar starts next Sunday!
Hi folks,
My six-week writing workshop starts next Sunday! I hope you will join us. We will be studying many examples from great authors and write weekly exercises to share in class. All seminars will be recorded for later review. I am open to offering partial scholarships based on economic need, particularly for people who want to contribute their writing to the course. Please email if you want to join up but find the price a barrier.
The information on registering is at the bottom of this email, or go to The Liminal Institute for details.
The Creative Word: How to Write Great Nonfiction
A six-week online seminar and writing workshop
The purpose of this course is to help you break through your blockages, find your voice, and powerfully express your unique truth.
Have you always wanted to write your book, memoir, or manifesto? Have you made attempts, only to find that something blocks you or holds you back?
Do you write blogs, essays or social media posts, but wish they connected more deeply with a larger audience?
Then this course is for you.
We meet for six Sundays, starting July 18. Each week, we focus on one aspect of the writing process:
Draw from your life experience
Discover the components shared by all great writing
Find subject matter that inspires you
Define your style and voice as a writer
Along the way, we explore many other questions, such as: How do you define your audience? What makes readers pay attention to what you have to say? In writing about yourself, when is personal honesty brave and authentic? When does it become unnecessarily confessional?
In this time of rapid transformation, we need skilled storytellers and critical thinkers who can give a voice to the collective.
Writing resembles other crafts and technical skills. Each week, we explore an essential aspect of the writing process. There will be a presentation followed by a group discussion. We will study examples from authors such as Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller, Anais Nin and David Foster Wallace, among others. We also review essays on the writing process for useful insights and tangible takeaways.
The main focus of this course is creative nonfiction including memoirs and personal essays. However, the tools we explore can be applied to a range of writing, from fiction to screenwriting to blog posts to articles.
You can choose from different enrollment options, depending on what level of criticism, editing, and feedback you want. Each week, students will share their work with the class. You have the option to write a series of assignments to share with the class. Participation is voluntary. These exercises are designed to help ignite your creative process.
Week One: Introduction — Why Write Now?
Great prose seamlessly melds style and subject, tone and theme, rhythm and rhetoric. Paradoxically, we often don’t even notice masterful prose because we read it without effort or friction, even when the writer tackles complex ideas and topics. When writing conveys authenticity and authority, we will follow an author almost anywhere they decide to take us.
In the introduction, we review the technical aspects of the writer’s craft as well as intangible elements that make writing successful.
Week Two: The Self as Subject
Not every writer wants to be a memoirist, but experimenting with memoir will help every writer improve.
In this section, we explore:
What makes your life experience unique?
The social function of the writer and thinker as “pattern interrupter.”
What parts of your story are worth sharing? What’s the difference between confessional or journal writing and art meant for the public?
Starting with your first memories: What makes you you?
As the narrator, how do you define yourself as a persona within your text? How do you convey authenticity and authority to your readers?
Week Three: What Makes Great Writing?
Writing is similar, in many ways, to music: Musical elements such as tone, pitch, rhythm, and melody are all present in writing. How do you use these for best effect?
How do you use these elements to capture and hold your reader’s attention?
What are keys to strong sentences and paragraphs?
How and when should you use tools such as metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration?
How do you make the syntax and rhythm of your prose mesh with your overarching themes and intention?
Writing and editing are inseparable: How do you revise and sharpen your work? How do you incorporate editing and rewriting into your creative process?
Week Four: Finding Your Subject Matter
What makes for compelling subject matter?
The fact is that almost any subject or theme can be compelling for a writer, if explored from a particular angle or perspective. Generally, what inspires the reader is the writer’s enthusiasm for their theme, how it catalyzes their creative insights. As a writer, then, you have to find the subject that enthralls you.
What is the difference between an anecdote and a story? How do you find an original take on a familiar subject?
Week Five: The Voice Is All
How do you establish your voice as a writer? How do you use it to convey narrative authority?
For inspiration, we examine the voice — consisting of tone, rhetoric, rhythm, style and syntax — of various masters of 20th Century prose, from Hemingway to Woolf to Kerouac.
Week Six: Conclusion: Writers and Society
We will review the main points of the course and also look at ways to get published / build an audience. We will go over final submissions from workshop participants. We will explore the importance of writing and thinking in this time of global transformation. Participants will have the option to develop articles for our accompanying web magazine, liminal.news.
ENROLLMENT / PRICE POINTS
Six weeks, starting Sunday July 18th. One three-hour live online class per week. Sundays from 12 pm - 3 pm EST. All classes are recorded and will be available for playback. VIEW ALL OPTIONS.
Full participation including critical review of writing samples: Students can submit work (either the proposed exercises or other writing samples) for consideration in the workshop. $200 enrollment. (Maximum 20 workshop participants). ($150 for paid subscribers to this newsletter). SIGN UP HERE
Attend / replay the classes without critical review or workshopping your own work: $120 enrollment ($80 for paid subscribers). SIGN UP HERE
Full participation plus a separate instructor edit on one writing sample up to 20 pages in length with half hour one-on-one conference call: $400 ($300 for paid subscribers). SIGN UP HERE.
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