Introductory Archives | Writers.com

Write Your First Chapbook: A Beginning Poet’s Guide

Elle | Community Manager — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 06:24:28 +0000

Are you ready to take the leap from a pile of poems to a polished collection? This workshop is designed for new and emerging poets who have written a dozen or more poems, and suspect they’ve got a chapbook in the making. If that sounds like you, this course will give you the structure, support, and strategy you need to take the next step.

Each session will begin with short, generative writing exercises and accessible lessons on poetic form and technique. We’ll cover line breaks, musicality, narrative tension, and ways to structure your poetry to build a sense of movement and emotional arc. You’ll also learn how to integrate critique into your drafting process, revise with intention, and sequence your poems to create a cohesive and compelling manuscript.

The heart of this course is our workshop. You’ll receive feedback on your poems with a focus on both the individual piece, and how it fits into your larger chapbook vision. We’ll explore how to move from standalone poems to a full, unified collection that reflects your voice and poetic range.

We’ll close out with a practical tutorial on the submission process—covering best practices, what to avoid, and how to navigate the world of chapbook publication with confidence.

Who This Course is For

This course is for new poets, perhaps just starting out, who never had formal instruction in poetry, people who want to learn, develop and expand their poetry skill set while crafting the foundations of their first chapbook.

Zoom Schedule

We will meet via Zoom on Tuesdays from 7-9 PM Eastern. The first Zoom call is on Tuesday, September 16th.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will learn to:

Investigate poetic forms, genres, and approaches to verse writing.
Reflect on poetry as a practice that demands artistic focus and fully integrates the intellectual and emotional life of the poet.
Support each other in taking next steps toward revision and/or polishing a foundational chapbook draft, working poem by poem.
Share and engage in techniques for storying one’s poetry for greater narrative force and maximum impact.
Develop a plan of action for confidently sharing your writing with others.
Have fun with poetry.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will:

Write and submit new poems each week.
Craft poetry that integrates and reflects your own lived experience and cognitive life.
Learn revision techniques.
Create a chapbook of your original poems.
Explore artistic practice through the craft of poetry.
Develop an individual poetry practice that feeds your artistic impulses.

Weekly Syllabus

Week One: Identity

Start Your Writing Journey!

Elle | Community Manager — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 17:59:16 +0000

Do you want to write a novel, memoir, or poetry, but have absolutely no clue where to begin? Got a sizzling writing idea, but need help to pursue your literary dream? Or don’t even know what you want to write, but know you gotta start somewhere? You can launch your writing career here. Right now.

This isn’t a grammar workshop, so write “lay” or “lie” depending on your mood. You’ll learn some key principles of good writing, as well as face down the pesky Inner Critic; tackle a variety of blocks and obstacles; explore creative goal-setting; discover your own unique approach to writing; and learn to build and sustain a writing life. And so much more. No previous writing experience necessary.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will:

Develop a toolkit to launch yourself into writing: anytime, anywhere.
Discover how to create your own writing prompts, in order to work either the left or right side of the brain.
Learn the secret formula to good writing, and how it might immediately improve the quality of your creative work.
Understand better just why you want to write, and how knowing that changes everything.
Uncover strategies to overcome perfectionism, writing blocks, fear… anything standing in the way of your writing.
Unearth your own personalized writing life, and how you might design your own unique creative habits and practices.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will:

Take part in in-class writes, designed to generate new work.
Experiment with writing several different genres.
Uncover hidden writing gifts and strengths.
Receive prompts for optional writing outside of class.
Write 8 to 15 new pieces during the course of the class.

Zoom and Wet Ink Schedule:

Classes held for six weeks on Wednesdays. Students will post weekly assignments on Wet.Ink.

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1: Gotta Start Somewhere

It Starts with Play: Get (Back) into Writing

Elle | Community Manager — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:28:59 +0000

Meet me on the page. In this six-week course, we’ll push ourselves creatively, freely playing with words and exploring new ideas. By the end, you will have working drafts of at least five poems, three pieces of flash fiction, or two short essays, as well as dozens of pages of free-writing and lists of ideas for future writing projects.

Designed for people new to creative writing and those looking to return after an extended break, our journey will begin with the first stage of writing, where we use loose associations, word play, experimentation of structure, and improvisation to generate seeds of thoughts that might later grow into poems or prose.

To do this, we’ll first learn from the Surrealists, who sought to free the imagination by focusing on process, as we employ intuition, chance, and surprise into our writing practice. Next, we’ll tackle the blank page with a nod to John Keats’ concept of negative capability whereby we’ll be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.”

We’ll make creative use of other art forms, thereby seeing how sight can lead to insight. Finally, we’ll explore modes of imagery, including the bodily senses, and we’ll be encouraged to write across genres, create hybrid works, and collaborate with each other.

Class discussions will revolve around the writing process, the writer’s life, how to best tackle the four stages of writing, and ways to tame the inner critic. In just a few weeks, you’ll blossom from tentative beginner to a creative writer who knows how to command the blank page, as well as methods for finalizing works-in-progress.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning goals

In this class, you will learn:

The difference between writing as process and writing as product.
How other writers use surprise and play in their creative writing and how to emulate that in your own writing.
Various ways to ignite your own writing.
How to have a deeper relationship with the mysteries that exist within you and the universe.
To develop your writerly voice and power.

Writing goals

In this class you will:

Create working drafts of five poems, three pieces of flash fiction, or two short essays.
Complete 30 pages of free-writing.
Develop a list of 40 ideas for future creative writing projects.
Establish a list of your short-term and long-term writing goals.

Zoom Schedule

We will meet on Zoom from 7-8 PM Eastern (4-5 PM Pacific) the following days:

9/10 Wed. 4-5pm Pacific

9/16 Tue. 4-5pm Pacific

9/23 Tue. 4-5pm Pacific

9/30 Tue. 4-5pm Pacific

10/7 Tue. 4-5pm Pacific

10/14 Tue. 4-5pm Pacific

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1 ~ Discovery writing, practice and process

The Elements of Fiction

Elle | Community Manager — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:29:30 +0000

Real life, made up.

In this course, you’ll immerse yourself in the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and gain new levels of control over your creative process, all while you produce multiple short stories or several chapters of a novel.

Writing fiction can be a lot like juggling—we’re building rich complex characters, developing plot and conflict toward a resolution, all while managing points of view, keeping settings clear and immersive, sketching realistic dialogue, and trying to make our sentences beautiful and pleasurable to read. Together, our class community will focus on one or two elements of fiction at a time, deepening our understanding as we go, to help you build the muscles and instincts of a great literary juggler. By the end of the course, you’ll find yourself writing more agile, complex, and confident prose, and feel ready to tackle bigger goals in your fiction—long forms like the novel, more sophisticated story structures, or new genres you’ve never tried before.

If you’re starting from scratch, this course will support you through the process of generating a new piece of fiction writing; if you’re already working on a larger project like a novel, we’ll jump in with you and help you develop it. In my lectures, which you can watch at your own pace throughout the week, I’ll talk you through my approach to each element of fiction with examples from great published work. Each week, you’ll submit portions of a story or novel chapter and receive feedback from me and your peers on what you’ve written, with full drafts due in weeks 4 and 8. And at the end of the course, you’ll select one story or chapter that you plan to revise and I’ll write you a personal revision letter to guide you through that process, so you can take the support of our class community with you even after the course is finished.

Learning & Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will:

Gain a deep understanding of the building blocks of fiction writing and get personal guidance as you put them into practice.
Pivot from thinking like a reader to thinking like a writer.
Participate in a writing community, giving and receiving specific, generous feedback.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will:

Build a consistent weekly writing practice, layering on new tools and skills as you go.
Write two short stories or several chapters of a novel.
Walk away with a targeted revision letter from me to support you in revising one of your submissions.

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1: How Fiction Works

The basics of character and plot, thinking like a reader vs. thinking like a writer, how to give great feedback.

Assignment: Submit the first 3-5 pages of your first story or chapter.

Week 2: Who’s Telling This Story Anyway?: Narrators and Point of View

Characterization through description, POV, and narrators.

Assignment: Refine or reconsider the point of view for your first story or chapter, and add another 3-5 pages.

Week 3: Setting the Scene

What is a scene, scene vs. summary, imagining immersive settings.

Assignment: Submit another 3-5 pages of your first story or chapter, with special attention to immersion in the details of setting and the micro-actions that propel a scene forward.

Week 4: Real People with Real Problems

A deeper look at character and plot.

Assignment: Full Draft of Story or Chapter #1 Due.

Week 5: Letting Your Characters Speak For Themselves

Dialogue, or, people never say what they really mean.

Assignment: Submit 3-5 pages of your second story or chapter, including at least one scene in which two or more people start out very much not on the same page and come to understand each other (imperfectly) through dialogue.

Week 6: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

The arc of a story, another angle on plot.

Assignment: Answer the questions in the prompt to brainstorm possible ways to introduce complications and ratchet up the tension in your work. Then write and submit another 3-5 pages.

Week 7: Flights of Poetic Fancy

What is style, how do sentences work, playing with language, and what we can learn from poets.

Assignment: Write your way toward the end of the story or chapter, generating at least another 3-5 pages, with special attention to moments of high intensity which can be deepened in significance with heightened, poetic language.

Week 8: Revision

Finding the story inside your story.

Assignment: Full Draft of Story or Chapter #2 Due.

Notify me when this course is scheduled

The post The Elements of Fiction appeared first on Writers.com.

Opening the Door to Poetry

Sean Glatch — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:20:34 +0000

What skills do we need to acquire if we are to express, in words, something of our marvelous complexity? How do we manipulate and control language to create something that seems beyond expression in “ordinary” words? What (and where) is this other world, this metaphorical space that poetry opens?

This workshop is an introduction to the craft of poetry; it is designed to help you explore and answer the questions posed above. During the workshop we will look closely at some of the defining characteristics of poetry—the line and stanza, images, rhythm and sound, the dynamics of tone and point of view, the interplay of movement and stillness, and the difficult, critical work of revision. We will begin to uncover the relationship between form and content and come to understand how a poem’s pacing, music, imagery, line length, and syntax enable its emotion; how, essentially, the poem creates its “argument” and emotional content through its structure.

Each week, via the Wet Ink platform, I will share an essay and/or two craft poems (with initial questions to help focus your explorations), and a weekly writing prompt (with instructions). Initial thoughts and reactions to the readings and craft poems begin on Wet Ink, but a weekly two hour Zoom meeting will be the place where we discuss your ideas and insights in more depth. The Zoom meeting is also the place where you can receive feedback on your own poems generated by the weekly prompts: this is where you can get real-time responses and suggestions from the whole group in a safe and supportive environment.

I have deliberately defined this experience as a workshop rather than a class because the word “workshop” implies saws, noise, grease, and dust; implies that the work itself, the making, is the pleasure! Poetry is a process, a voyage of discovery, full of serious play and rewarding labour. The title of the workshop has, of course, two possible readings, and the door opens both ways: by becoming more fluent and adept in the reading of poems you will open doors into new subjects and possibilities, and this fluency in and mastery of craft will allow the mysterious animal that is poetry to step through that door and enter your own creations so that they become an embodiment of (not just a statement about) an idea or feeling. Poetry, after all, is alive: let’s open the door!

Learning and Writing Goals

Explore the relationship between form/structure and content in poems
Explore the main aspects of poetic craft
Gain confidence in the ability to manipulate language to craft poems that reveal and enact their subject.
Encourage the development of a sustainable poetic practice, which involves close reading, daily/weekly generative writing, and a commitment to revision.
Create a portfolio of at least 6 new works/drafts of poems
Receive poem feedback from peers and the instructor in a weekly Zoom workshop
Provide various strategies for revision (essentially “re-visioning”) of initial drafts

Weekly Zoom Schedule

Opening the Door to Poetry will meet Thursdays from 5:00-7:00 pm US Eastern Time.

Zoom sessions will be two hours in length.

Syllabus

Week One: To Break or Not to Break: The Line

How to Craft a Poem

Frederick Meyer — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 23:38:26 +0000

Express yourself through poetry.

In this course, we will explore the kaleidoscopic possibilities of what a poem can be. We will view the poet as an artisan who can craft any poem they wish—one that expresses what moves them, one that tells a story, one written in a rigorous, traditional form, or one that communicates their innermost thoughts.

Each week, we will meet online for an hour to learn and discuss poetry. Together, we will read works by contemporary poets, then break down the craft elements of each poem before applying these techniques to our own writing. Outside of class, I will assign a generative writing exercise. You’ll also get the chance to hear your classmates’ poems, as well as share your own. In this way, this is a course that centers the writing community.

By the end of this course, you will have experimented with a variety of modes, forms and approaches to writing poetry. This course is ideal for beginning poets who want to develop their appreciation of poetry, and try their hand at their first poems in a supportive environment. No prior experience is necessary, but do come prepared to discuss the readings, share your own writing, try new ways of writing, and provide feedback to your peers.

Learning & Writing Objectives

By the end of this course, we will have:

A kaleidoscopic sense of what a poem can be and become acquainted with a variety of forms and modes used in contemporary poetry
An understanding of how to approach poem-writing in various ways and an appreciation of the craft of writing
A portfolio of several original poems and generative writing
A “writer’s toolkit” or writing techniques that we can continue to apply to our writing

Zoom Schedule

How to Craft a Poem will meet every Wednesday at 8 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. Zoom sessions will be approximately 1 hour in length.

Weekly Syllabus: How to Craft a Poem

Join us for an exploration of the many tools and approaches to writing poetry today.

WEEK 1: STILL LIVES & LANDSCAPES: THE ART OF VIVID WRITING

In a visual arts class, the still life is often indispensable as it emphasizes the importance of observation. In the first week, we will read poems and, through writing exercises, learn to make pictures with words.

WEEK 2: STORYTELLING: BRINGING POETRY TO LIFE

In week 2, we will build on the skills we learned in week 1 by learning to animate pictures into moving images and, eventually, stories.

WEEK 3: PERSONA & VOICE: ESTABLISHING PRESENCE

This week, we switch from an image-based to a persona-based approach to poetry. We’ll talk about the ideas of “persona” and “voice” and play with ways to craft a voice-driven poem.

WEEK 4: MEDITATION & ARGUMENT: MODES OF BEING

Building on the concepts of persona and voice, this week we turn inwards. We’ll read poems working in the meditative and argumentative modes, talk about the variety of poetic modes there are in poetry, and discuss the concept of structure.

WEEK 5: FORM: THE ART OF SHAPING THOUGHT

In week 5, we’ll encounter a variety of forms, both traditional and contemporary. In this week’s writing exercise, we’ll rewrite a poem we’ve already written in a form of our choosing.

WEEK 6: RHYTHM AND SOUND: CRAFTING THE POETIC EXPERIENCE

This week, we turn from the language of craft to the language of experience. We will also explore the role of rhythm and sound in shaping the experience of poetry.

Why Take a Poetry Writing Course with Writers.com?

We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
Small groups keep our online writing classes lively and intimate.
Work through your weekly written lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
Share and discuss your work with classmates in a supportive class environment.
Award-winning instructor Zining Mok will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

Start crafting your best poetry. Secure your seat now!

Notify me when this course is scheduled

Student Comments

The post How to Craft a Poem appeared first on Writers.com.

The Joy of Poetry: A Beginner-Friendly Workshop

Frederick Meyer — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 23:38:24 +0000

Do you want to get started as a poet? Or do you dabble in writing poetry, but want to learn (or revisit) basic elements of craft? This highly experiential, non-critiquing workshop is for you! We’ll read and discuss quality contemporary poems, explore basic poetic craft elements and genres, and experiment with a wide variety of challenging poetry exercises. We’ll also have a playful time busting through your most persistent poetry blocks. Come write, write, write yourself silly. Seriously. No previous poetry experience necessary, and in-class writing feedback optional.

Learning and Writing Goals

By the end of this course, students will learn:

Basic poetry elements, including: metaphor, simile, image, rhythm, voice, line breaks, end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, anaphora, and meter.
Basic poetry forms: ekphrastic, blank verse, narrative, sonnet, haiku, couplets, odes, and epistolary and found poems.
Introduction to contemporary poets Tony Hoagland, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Schultz, Marilyn Krysl, Louise Erdrich, Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Ethridge Knight, William Baer, Billy Collins, Michael Henry, John Brehm, Pablo Neruda, Edwin Romand, and Mark Irwin.

Students will write several poems using basic poetry elements and in a variety of forms.

Zoom Schedule

This course will meet every Wednesday from 7:00-8:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.

Course Syllabus

Week 1: The Delight of Poetry.

(Live Workshop) Intro to Screenwriting

Frederick Meyer — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 23:38:22 +0000

So you have a killer idea for a movie?

Fabulous! Let’s get to work on that screenplay.

Screenwriting is its own art form. Unlike narrative writing, a screenwriter creates a living document that serves as a blueprint for collaborative storytelling. The screenwriter is the one who breathes initial life into the characters, worlds, and dramas unfolding on screen, but he/she/they must also take into account the needs of director, producer and crew who will be shooting the script.

Learning and Writing Goals

This online workshop explores the key concepts and basic elements involved in the process of screenwriting. We will take a look at the three-act structure, discuss character motivation, and become familiar with screenwriting software. We will establish a common vocabulary for approaching the screenplay. (Previous writing experience is not necessary!)

Measurable Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this workshop, you will:

Have an understanding of the key concepts of a screenplay.
Understand how to a properly format a scene.
Become familiar with the seven basic steps to writing a screenplay.
Establish a common vocabulary for discussing a screenplay.
Write a logline and a treatment for a film idea.

Workshop Schedule

This workshop will be presented via Zoom from 7:00-9:00 P.M. U.S. Eastern Time.

30 Min: Introduction
15 Min: Taking a look at the three-act structure
15 Min: Introducing the seven basic steps for writing a screenplay
30 Min: Student writing time (logline and treatment)
15 Min: Sharing story ideas
15 Min: Questions

Notify me when this course is scheduled

The post (Live Workshop) Intro to Screenwriting appeared first on Writers.com.