Fundamental Workshops: Skills & Techniques
These workshops provide students with the necessary skills and techniques to make their writing more effective and compelling. Each workshop concentrates on the development of a set of skills required for a particular general category of writing. Students will apply what they’ve learned to writing assignments and receive personal feedback from the instructor. Student work will be posted for group critique, and all students are encouraged to participate in ongoing critique and discussion sessions. These workshops are not a prerequisite for the Project Workshops below, but they are strongly recommended.
Accelerated Fundamentals Of Fiction Writing
This version of Fundamentals of Fiction Writing is only six weeks long. We’ve condensed the course material from the longer versions of this course, and designed this fast-paced workshop for those students who want to start writing fiction now, or who don’t have the time to commit to a 12-week workshop. In this accelerated workshop, you can get all the fundamentals you’ll need to start writing short stories, a novel, or anything in between.
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Accelerated Fundamentals Of Nonfiction Writing
This version of Fundamentals of Nonfiction Writing is only six weeks long. We’ve condensed the course material from the longer versions of this course, and designed this fast-paced workshop for those students who want to start writing nonfiction now, or who don’t have the time to commit to a 12-week workshop. In this accelerated workshop, you can get all the fundamentals you’ll need to start writing magazine articles, a nonfiction book, personal essays, etc.
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Accelerated Getting Started In Writing
Do you feel you have an aptitude for writing, but you’ve never had a chance to really give it serious attention? Perhaps you’ve been writing reports and memos for work, and you’re yearning to try something more creative—maybe even try your hand at freelancing. Are you overwhelmed by the possibilities? Or not even sure what the possibilities are? You’ve come to the right place!
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Extended Getting Started In Writing
Do you have an aptitude for writing that you’ve never had a chance to develop? Perhaps you write memos and reports for work, but yearn to try something more creative. In this workshop, you will explore your writing interests and discover your personal aptitudes for writing. You will be introduced to a wide variety of categories of writing, and learn basic techniques to improve your narrative skills.
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Fundamentals Of Fiction Writing
Give voices and stories to the characters that fill your imagination. Whether your fantasies take the form of short stories or a novel, this workshop prepares you to write fiction. You will apply the techniques that generations of fiction writers have used to bring their characters and stories to life. You will also develop your individual style and creative expression.
You will work with a published fiction author to write and revise short stories or a novel chapter, up to 3000 words total.
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Fundamentals Of Life Stories Writing
Writing is an inherently private activity – and the most personal form is the journal. This is often the jumping off point for a more formal approach to life stories writing, but the inspiration can come from many other sources. You may be intimately familiar with the events and “characters” themselves, you may never have given the thought to the actual process of turning these personal memories and experiences into stories that can be read and enjoyed than others.
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Fundamentals Of Nonfiction Writing
Nonfiction writing appeals to the amateur historian/anthropologist/psycholigst/biographer in all of us. When you pursue nonfiction writing, you can research, interview, and explore virtually any subject that interests you, and then write about what you’ve learned.
Contemporary nonfiction is more than facts and figures – readers expect their nonfiction to be engaging, compelling, entertaining and, of course, informative. Apply creative writing techniques to any nonfiction project, from personal essays to articles or full-length books. You will work with a published nonfiction writer to complete an article, collection of other related essays or a chapter of a nonfiction book (up to 2,500 words).
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Fundamentals of Poetry Writing
Poetry writing is a very personal art form; at its best it flows freely from the heart and soul of the poet. But poetry writing also has stylistic conventions and rhythmic patterns that—once understood and mastered—can enhance the emotional content of your verse with design and structure.
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Fundamentals Of Writing For Children
Writing for children can be both personally and professionally rewarding. It means returning to a child’s point of view, full of wonder when learning something new and letting your imagination run wild. Bright, curious young readers demand realistic compelling characters and exciting plots just as much – if not more – than their adult counterparts.
While the focus of this workshop is fiction, the basic fundamentals can be applied to children’s nonfiction as well. Work with a published children’s author to write a complete children’s story book or chapters (up to 2000 words), for ages anywhere from five to fifteen.
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Getting Started In Writing
Do you have an aptitude for writing that you’ve never had a chance to develop? Perhaps you write memos and reports for work, but yearn to try something more creative. In this workshop, you will explore your writing interests and discover your personal aptitudes for writing. You will be introduced to a wide variety of categories of writing, and learn basic techniques to improve your narrative skills.
This workshop provides an introduction and overview to a number of types of writing, from fillers, to short stories, to books. You’re encouraged to experiment with a variety of forms with the goal of discovering your own writing path.
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Novel Writing: Scene Fundamentals
Discover how the key elements of fiction—character, plot, setting, motivation, and tension—are combined to create compelling scenes that bring your novel to life for your reader. By understanding your authorial choices, character motivation, and scene intentions—and by using key points in Jordan E. Rosenfeld’s Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at Time—you’ll learn how to craft scenes that hook your readers and keep them turning the pages.
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Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint
Discover how crucial decisions regarding characters, point of view, and authorial flexibility can generate an emotionally compelling work that your reader will love to explore. By beginning with your character and his or her viewpoint—and using key points in Nancy Kress’s Write Great Fiction: Characters, Emotion, & Viewpoint—you’ll learn how to craft characters so intriguing that your reader will be drawn in to learn more about their story with each turn of the page.
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Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting
In this course we’ll consider the importance of description and setting in creating a fully believable, fully realized fictional world. More importantly, we’ll consider what makes description effective—how precise language, combined with surprising ways of looking at familiar things, creates a full experience for a reader—and how you might begin employing these techniques in your own work to create characters and settings which hum with life.
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