Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” This perhaps aptly describes the process of writing a novel—a long, difficult, and often fraught task—but it also underscores the exciting potential novels have to portray great swaths of our complex lives and experiences. In this class, we will take a deep dive into workshopping your novels and the complex lives and experiences they reveal. We will address how to revise and deepen overarching creative choices such as character, voice, and setting, and we will undertake a nuts-and-bolts approach to how to construct structure, plot, and tension. Craft issues that emerge within participants’ work will guide our writing exercises and the published material we read. We will also spend some time discussing the publishing process and what agents and editors are looking for in the novels they acquire. Over the course of the 8-week class, participants should be prepared to bring in a novel synopsis and to workshop one or two (depending on time/participants) 15- to 20-page excerpts of their novels-in-progress.