Teaching

For many of us, writing is a tug-of-war between wanting to know where we’re going and letting the process (whatever that is) take over. Playing tug-of-war with yourself is unnerving, 

yet writers who’ve learned to embrace the not-knowing say it’s the only way they

can make anything true and moving. 

 

An interviewer once asked the writer and master of the craft Charles Baxter: Do you have, as

you write, a kind of internal compass pointing you toward the unexpected, or do you stumble

around in a story, searching for the right detail?

Baxter: Oh, I stumble. It’s all stumbling, all the time.

Ann Beattie once said: Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on that rock, now I’m on this rock.

 

How do these trusting-the-process writers get anything worthwhile on the page if they have neither a compass nor a map? In this workshop we’ll spend the day writing from prompts that allow us to stumble from rock to rock. How? Here are a few examples:

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By listening to the sentences (E.L. Doctorow).  By feeling the heat (George Saunders).

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By looking for commotion (Richard Ford). By letting the unconscious rule the page (Aimee Bender).  By allowing ourselves to write badly (Jennifer Egan). By not judging (Philip Roth). By believing in ourselves “despite the evidence” (Kent Haruf).     

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This workshop is for anyone who writes fiction, poetry, memoir, personal essays, plays, songs or any other imaginative genre.