There are three key elements I would venture to say you must engage to be a writer, to produce your creative body of work, your stories, your book, and to find your voice in the world.
First, you must write. You must—by reading primarily, and through community if you are able—put yourself in the company not of your abilities now but of your ambitions. Most of us write because we’ve been swept off our feet by reading—by language and story, character and imagery, by the accrued meaning of pictures drawn in words. So, you must write in the company of those inspiring passages, those heavy-lifting, light-footed sentences and paragraphs that break open your heart or your brain or sometimes both.
We do this in my writing studio craft class, which I am calling Time to Write for all the meanings that phrase conjures, for the need we have of time and the need of deadline, of the imperative context, of a group of moving pens and gently clacking keyboards and an overseeing guide to tell us, “start,” and “stop,” and “read it to us so you can find out what’s there,” and “this is what I see in your work.”
Then you need a deep, organic understanding of story—which most of us do have as audience, as reader—but you need to be able to wield that understanding, to bring it to bear on our your stories, to use it as an instrument for building something truly fine, deeply compelling, effective, as we all want our writing to be. Story is endlessly fascinating, a deep human need that follows certain rhythms, shapes reliable grooves and still manages to surprise and shock us, to hold us in its grip.
In our NEW Book in a Year course, we become masters of story, shaping our own in conversation with those rhythms and patterns that have delighted us and held us in awe since childhood. This course meets monthly across the breadth of a whole year so that you may build a daily writing habit, map a story and then drill deep as you tunnel from beginning to middle to end, emerging with your book—strong and powerful, moving and effective—in a gorgeous thick stack of pages.
This is a class with discussion and assignments, though like all BWW classes, you are always writing your content, your stories, your way. The guidance of BIAY takes you on the journey, caravans beside you with the supplies and coaching you need to make it the whole way. Angie will be joining me to teach sections of this course.
And finally, you need readers. Not just any readers, and not, initially, critics, but passionate, attentive, articulate, committed readers. You need to know what it’s like to read your stories or books. What experience have you created for the reader? Do the pages do what you intended? Might there be hidden possibilities shimmering just below the surface, ways to make it stronger, more exactly what you hoped when you began with a vision or simply bald hope?
Workshop gives you a team of readers, of allies, people who climb into your manuscript and report from the trenches, who remember to praise what you’ve done that moves, engages, entertains, surprises—what works, for this is perhaps what we know least when we open our pen-gripping fists and let the work fly into the world. My workshop is limited to five plus me and powers your writing and your writing life. Ready to get your work into the world? Sign on for the best team of reader/ writers anyone could hope to have.
What do you need most right now, to actualize your greatest dream? How will your feel if you launch this year with exactly the right support in place to do what you were meant to do? I’m not saying it has to be a BWW class. I make my classes very small, intimate and focused with lots of personal attention. I don’t have space for all of you, but I do intend to support all of you in building a writing life that succors and supports your vision, your talent. And for a few of you, I can do that more directly, in my classes.
I’ll open enrollment next week. Please keep your eyes open next Thursday—in the middle of your various summer concerns—to give time for making your fall transformative for you as a writer. I’m also going to give my mailing list a few days head start on the general public, and I’ve added a couple of classes, so there will be a few spaces after my current students finish signing up this week. If you haven’t joined my mailing list, you can do so by signing up below or on the home page for my free Fearless and Finished course. If you know in your heart that you and I can actualize your greatest dream together—why keep putting it off? How terrible will it feel if you let it go by one more time? And how wonderful will it feel to be doing what you were meant to do, without putting it off for one more day?!