Six Fridays, Jan. 29-June 17 (Jan. 29, Feb. 26, March 25, April 22, May 20, June 17) 7-9:30 p.m. (plus online activity between meetings) San Francisco
$365 members/$395 others Cancellation Policy Student Testimonials
Congratulations! You’ve started your novel. You have a sense of your main character and some ideas of the plot, maybe even a full plot outline. You’ve written a few pages, gotten some feedback, and know what your strengths are. Now the challenge is: TO KEEP GOING AND NOT GIVE UP.
“Most of us need help with that,” says Karen. “We need someone in our corner, gently enforcing some discipline while at the same time encouraging us. We need someone to kick ideas around with. We need help with craft, someone to help us make sure our story is coming together. And we need to be around others who are in the same boat.”
So come join a group of other people who can help you with discipline, encouragement, focus and craft. “You’ll check in with me once a week,” says Karen, “giving progress reports and letting me know if you’re having any difficulties I can help with. You’ll also have a writing partner with whom to swap pages and exchange gentle critiques. At the monthly meetings, I’ll give you craft exercises to help solve the problems I see people having, and twice during the six-month period, you’ll have the chance to have a chapter read and discussed by the group as a whole, and to receive written feedback from me.”
Taking this class may mean giving up an exciting date night, movie, or whatever your brand of TGIF fun may be, but hey, that’s a small price to pay for completing your novel, right?
Karen Bjorneby started writing by participating in workshops just like this one. She is the author of Hurricane Season: Stories from the Eye of the Storm (Sourcebooks, 2001), which received a Foreword Honorable Mention as best independent/university press short story collection of the year at Book Expo America. She has received a Pushcart Special Mention, two other Pushcart nominations, a National Magazine Award nomination, and she was named a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in nearly two dozen publications including The Threepenny Review, The North American Review, New Letters, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, The New Orleans Review, The Nebraska Review, and The Sun. She is currently at work on her own novel and, she says, is “very familiar with the pitfalls along the way, having fallen into several of them myself.”