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, setting, voice, and diction, 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 10-week class, participants should be prepared to bring in a novel synopsis and to workshop two 15- to 20-page excerpts of their novels-in-progress.
- This event has passed.
Writers Workshops
Novel 2020-108
About the instructor
LAURA BIAGI, a former literary agent of New York Times bestselling novelists, worked at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc., (JVNLA) for eight years before moving to Houston to obtain her MFA at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she has received an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship. She also serves as Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.
By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration policies. Remember to sign up for the waiting list if the workshop you would like to take is full. To see the full Winter/Spring 2020 workshop schedule click here.
