Muse & the Marketplace 2018

Have you ever considered writing a young adult novel? Have you wondered what, exactly, makes a novel young adult? Does the idea of writing an authentic teen voice make you thrilled and/or terrified? How should you decide whether to make the leap? Join young adult author Jennifer De Leon for an informative session that breaks down some of the myths and mystery around this fast-growing publishing category. (Spoiler: it's every bit as challenging--and rewarding--as writing for adults.) They'll share their own reasons for pursuing young adult writing, offer an overview of today's YA industry, and--through creative exercises and discussion--help you discover the young adult novel in you.

It's an incredible time to be a magazine writer, because accessing an editor you want to write for has never been easier. The problem? The fact that accessing editors has never been easier. Everyone's trying to do it.
In a sea of pitches and story ideas, how can yours stand out from the crowd? In this seminar, you will learn how to hone your pitch, contact editors, and generate original content. You'll leave better equipped and less daunted about how to navigate magazine publications and make your pitches stick.

Our present may be a moving target, but the debates and injustices we face today have deep roots in history. What can the lives of our ancestors teach us? What research methods are the most useful? What are the ethical concerns involved in telling the stories of others? What debts do we owe to the dead? Who are we answerable to in the present? 

In this discussion and guided writing class, we will examine the different techniques and methods used to create vivid stories set in the past. We will focus on writers who reconstruct, reexamine and, often, rewrite the past in order to speak to urgent concerns of the present. After a discussion of examples, we will segue into writing prompts for accessing the past in expansive and generative ways, with an aim toward writing a deeper understanding of our current times.

Description coming!

If you're the rare writer who hasn't ever wrestled with motivation, confidence, and time-management skills, then stop reading right now. But if you've had trouble sitting down at the desk, or staying there, or concentrating on your own words, or if you've been struck by a bad case of imposter syndrome, then this session is for you. You'll learn how to push yourself into more productive and challenging work, through motivation-boosting techniques borrowed from sports. No matter what your experience with exercise, you'll learn how to use an athlete's tools like interval training, periodization, and the concept of training zones to help you embark on and complete your writing project. You'll leave the session with a plan for how to accomplish your short-term and long-term goals.

As writers we are accustomed to making sentences, trying to forge a language shapely enough to express that which is often resistant to both shapeliness and expression, if not language itself. Generally it turns out to be harder than it looks. No doubt much of what we know about the sentence we don’t even quite realize we know: like ex-lovers, we tend to be made more aware of its qualities by their absence than their presence.

So it's bracing to consider exactly what a sentence does, and what it requires of us, and what is the difference between a good one and a bad one and a great one, and how cosmically unfair it is that even on those world historic occasions when we somehow manage to come up with a really good sentence, we’re not allowed to repeat it. We're not allowed to repeat it. And still we have to go on making more. So there may be some benefit to looking at the process and the product of all this sentence-making together, and seeing what useful conclusions we might draw from that. Who knows, we may even write some of our own.

An exercise in close reading. The discussion will help illuminate the consequences of decisions that writers make word by word and phrase by phrase when constructing sentences, as well as the way associative thinking works when one is trying to read analytically, and possibly even the larger implications of close reading in terms of decoding the world.

We’re living in an age of wrath, one in which the impulse to make art is being shouted down by the desire to make war. In this freewheeling workshop, we’ll examine how writers are able to harness their anger and use it as an engine for their stories. We’ll look at the work of masters such as Claire Messud and Herman Melville, and use an in-class exercise to examine the sorrows that lurk beneath the armor of our anger.

From the first sentence, we know if we are in confident, capable hands. The best writers establish authority immediately. By authority I mean that there is a clear sense of control, and that this confidence is earned with particular language, tone, detail, cadence, and, most importantly, by creating urgency, a simple question of “why should I keep reading?”
Take the opening of Jim Shepard’s story “Boys Town”: “Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse.” Immediately we realize that this is a masterful writer using words as a weapon, that each word is placed exactly where it is intended, that the rhythms speak to a musicality that is in concert with the narrator and the action. We are propelled sentence to sentence by this musicality and we want to know more about the narrator and why he considers himself such a fatalistic mess.
No matter the form or genre, first, second, or third person, past or present, speculative or hyper-realistic, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, establishing authority is the first and most important task of the writer. We will look at numerous first pages across forms, including work from Karen Russell, ZZ Packer, Joe Wenderoth, Lydia Davis, Helen McDonald, Carmen Maria Machado, and many more, subjecting the texts to the same cold reading standard I have at Tin House, where we receive upwards of 20,000 submissions a year.

"How autobiographical is this?" is the question asked every fiction author, no matter how far or how close the material might seem to be from their life. "How much of this did you make up?" is the question asked of every personal essayist and memoirist. The questions may seem pedantic but they speak to some underlying issues, regarding the ways writers use their life in their work, what constitutes fiction, and what, nonfiction.  How do we use the material of our life in fiction? How do we write about ourselves using more than memories? What are the ethics to each practice, and what constitutes crossing a boundary? And what is the nature of fiction and of nonfiction, and does it still matter? We will begin with a writing exercise that can be used to start either an essay or a work of fiction, and then address how each might be constructed accordingly, out of the same anecdote, and with that, all of the issues we encounter along the way.