Laurie Wagner & Gretchen Clark
Creative Nonfiction, Personal Essay, Writing Practice
Classes on this page are co-taught by Laurie Wagner & Gretchen Clark
Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Essay
Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Essay 2
The Lyric Essay
Piece of Cake: Writing Flash Nonfiction
About Laurie Wagner
About Gretchen Clark
Student Comments
Complete List of Writers.com Classes
Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Essay (10 weeks)
With Laurie Wagner & Gretchen Clark
If you have a story to tell, if you're fairly confessional and believe that truth is stranger than fiction, then the creative nonfiction, personal essay writing class is for you.
Creative nonfiction and personal essay are powerhouses in the story-telling genre. They're the volcanic marriage of real life and fiction, and a chance to deliver our stories with sass, color and voice. By using a variety of techniques such as dialogue, melody and narrative, creative non-fiction and personal essay breathe new life into the ordinary telling of our tales.
Anything is fodder for creative nonfiction; the fight you had with the supermarket check-out person, the time your brother ran you over with his bike, your first real kiss and the lessons you learned about yourself when you stopped to give change to the corner panhandler. By delving into our experiences we squeeze the marrow from our lives and explore our emotional territory, sharing and making meaning out of the events in our lives.
The ten-week class class will focus on finding our voice and discovering our stories, editing our material, and learning the non-fiction markets. There will be a weekly writing assignment and students will come away from class with at least four finished essays.
CLASS OUTLINE
Topics listed will be covered in emailed "mini-lectures." In addition, every other week, beginning with week two, participants will be asked to email drafts of specified parts of their work to the entire list, and to provide feedback on the work of others.
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Creative Nonfiction and the Personal Essay 2 (10 weeks)
Class will be ten weeks long and there will be five small lectures littered throughout the weeks. This is a great class for writers who are motivated to write each week, who can send us their work regularly and who want to work hard. Group critique and personal coaching from Laurie will be a regular weekly feature, especially during the weeks without a lecture.
Getting better at essay writing simply means writing a lot more essays. If this sounds good to you and you want your essays to go deeper and become more sophisticated, Personal Essay and Creative Non-Fiction 2 is for you. You'll need to have completed the first Personal Essay writing class with Laurie Wagner as a prerequisite. While Laurie will be in touch with students every week with either mini lectures or tips and stories related to writing, the emphasis in this class will be on critique and re-writing. That means that this class will appeal to the writer who is fairly independent and can see themselves working on their own without assignment and meeting weekly deadlines to turn in work. What you get in return is solid weekly feedback from Laurie as well as comments and critique from your fellow students.
The goals of the class are to:
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The Lyric Essay (10 weeks)
With Laurie Wagner & Gretchen Clark
Meet the lyric essay, the beautiful wild child of personal essay meets poetry, meets your grocery list. The lyric essay is the girl with the literary lime streak in her hair who refuses to conform. Limits. Restrictions. Rules. These boundaries do not exist in the world of the lyric. Imagine instead, telling the story of your first true love through the wisdom of fortune cookies. Consider telling a tale about motherhood using song titles or street signs.
Through this fascinating writing genre that draws on all forms of nonfiction and poetical elements, we will push past preconceived literary boundaries and break out of self-constructed writing confines.
In our ten-weeks together we will create fresh new essays that look and sound like nothing you've written before. This course is for anyone who has been searching for something more, something different, something outside the mainstream. Our time together promises to be a completely different, super creative and totally freeing approach to essay writing. We will embrace experimentation, foster individual perspective and encourage the growth of your creativity through weekly lectures, drawing on interviews from established lyric essay writers as well as sample essays on the limitless style of the lyric. A fun and imaginative menu of assignments will also be provided weekly. Join us.
Lecture 1: She Of The Lime Green Streaks
In this first class we will meet the lyric essay and appreciate what makes it one of the most imaginative and creative writing genres around. We will talk about the ingredients of a good lyric essay, and what writers will need to leave at the classroom door before they enter this hall of abandon. We will talk about form, because the lyric is all about finding a lyrical swerve to our stories, and telling them in new and unusual ways. Students will also draft a list of stories they want to explore over the 10-weeks.
Lecture 2: What My Grocery List Will Tell You About My Mother-In-Law
Since the lyric is all about playful form, we will explore a number of different lyric shapes including the braided essay and the hermit crab essay, as well as read examples of what other lyric essayists have experimented with. Writers will look at their own stories and begin to get a sense for their shape and what lyric forms would compliment and enhance each piece.
Lecture 3: Jail Break
Because the lyric essay demands that we move away from formality and the old way of telling our stories, we will want to have as much access as possible to our more intuitive, creative and instinctual voices. We'll want to think outside of the box, in fact, let's run away from that box and break free from all of our previously learned literary limits to find ourselves in an entirely new and wide open writing territory. This week we will talk about how to write and think without a box and we'll focus on exercises that will help us to tap into our creative imagination. We will talk about how dreams, bits of overheard conversations, billboards, yogurt labels and song jingles can inform our stories and make them more interesting.
Lecture 4: On Fire
Choosing the kinds of stories we want to write about is important for two reasons. One, if you're writing for an audience your stories must offer the reader something and not just be an exercise that you alone appreciate. And two, the easiest stories to write are the ones that are burning up inside of us, the ones that want to come out, the ones that are teetering on some edge. So it's important to ask ourselves what we care about and what's worth writing about. In this lecture we will also talk about the tenets of a good story; showing not telling, and the importance of scene, dialog, and character detail.
Lecture 5: Ruby Slippers
The lyric can have a magical, out of this world quality. It wants to come alive in a melodic, expressive and energetic way. There are many ways to pull the melody out of our writings and so this week we'll talk about poetic expression, elements like rhythm, white space, line break, assonance, and inversion, that will lift and push our pieces past the mundane and toward that magic.
Lecture 6: It's My Party
A story should be a journey the writer takes the reader on and there needs to be a pact between reader and writer such that if you read my work you will come away with something. I'm not here to play with myself, but actually have something you might need. And so there is this obligation to the reader that the writer must be aware of, and which can make us more thoughtful and developed writers. We will also talk about the importance of meaning in our work and why the lyric isn't just a word salad that doesn't come together.
Lecture 7: TNT, It's Dynamite
At this point in the class students will have had access to at least 28 different writing assignments they can pick and choose from. We will spend this week uncovering even more of the lyric form to play with, as well as introducing the liberating concept of detonating that comfortable but oh-so-predictable linear narrative line which we've previously constructed our essays around.
Lecture 8: From Diving Boards to Ding Dongs
In more traditional essay writing we make a big deal out of transitions and logical steps that take the reader from one thoughtful paragraph to the next. Not so with the lyric. This week we will play with associative leaps; making connections that are inspired from the intuition as well as from the form. We will also talk about the difference between delivering ideas to readers verses posing questions, which can be equally triggering.
Lecture 9: Drop a Heart, Break a Name
These past few weeks have been about experimenting and getting comfortable with the lyric form. We've used a variety of pure nonfiction templates like recipes, CD catalogs and bumper stickers to get you rolling on the lyric road. This week the training wheels come off. We are going to get really broken and jagged and more than a little distorted in our writing this week because the lyric just doesn't look different, it FEELS different. We will introduce the mosaic and collage-like nature of the lyric, and by building our essays with diverse elements and focusing on fragmentation we will move into creating pieces that are raw and more emotionally authentic.
Lecture 10: A Day in the Life of the Lyric
During our last week we'll send writers out into the world to compile stories from their own lyrical landscapes. While classes can be a wonderful jumping off place, it's essential that writers remember that MAKING ART doesn't just happen when you clean off your desk and sit down to think. We want writers to get in the habit of writing even when they're not writing; when they're walking the street, when they're driving carpool, or standing in the grocery line. Writers can even write when they're dreaming. Everything is material for porous creatures who are hungry to capture the nuance of a moment. This week reminds students to act spontaneously, trust their instinct as they assemble the bits and pieces, the detritus that land along the path of one simple day.
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Piece of Cake: Writing Flash Nonfiction (10 weeks)
With Laurie Wagner & Gretchen Clark
Are you hungry?
For a new way to tell stories?
Starved?
To learn how to connect with your reader in fewer words?
Famished?
To learn a craft that will impact all of your writing?
Yes. Yes and Yes?
Then come join us for a Piece of Cake.
This flash nonfiction class is simply a slice, not the whole cake. Its about bite-sized literature morsels of 1000 words or less and how satisfying they can be.
Piece of Cake is the story moment, the fat cut from the bone. Its the real deal without the fixins; no side orders, no extras, just the character and the scene and the incredible aha! where it all comes together.
Some of our stories will be as long as 1000 words, others will be less; 750, 500and a cupcake-sized one at 200. This is a class that focuses on the craft of learning how to choose the right words and the right moments that will tell a reader everything they need to know about an entire world in only a few pages.
Here's a sampling of what we'll be serving up in our ten weeks together:
1. Ingredients
What goes into a delicious piece of flash nonfiction? In our introductory lecture we'll share with you the goods you'll need to get started writing flash nonfiction.
2. Butter Me Up With A Good Hook Cake
This week its all about the start because in flash nonfiction we don't have the luxury of being able to meander into our stories. This writing is about immediacy, verve and layering, about building on the all important beginning. Our beginning, the lead, that thing sometimes called the hook, is paramount because its the reader's first taste of your piece. It has to have spice, zest, richness, and intensity--a dark chocolate bite that captures our interest. It has to make us want to sit down and devour the next line and the next and the next. This lecture will show you how to create the best beginning to your story through a mix of yummy examples and tasty advice from published writers we've interviewed on this topic.
3. Pineapple Upside Down Your Mind Cake
What are you hungry for? If you could eat anything right now what would it be? Are you craving something salty or something sweet? You could stand at the frig and put lots of things into your mouth and work your way to quite a stomach ache, but you'll be happier if you choose one thing. Its the same in writing; while you could write about anything the day your mother drove away for good the gift your high school English teacher gave you that changed your life the best stories are the ones that you've just got to tell, the ones that wont go away. This lecture is about generating and choosing the stories that will make the most impact and linger in the readers mind the longest.
4. Apple Crisp Style Cake
Style is the pink frosting, the rainbow jimmies, the sugar stars, the silver balls, the cocoa powder dusting to our writing. Style combines two key components: the idea to be expressed and the unique way the writer chooses to convey it. Limited word count in flash nonfiction actually allows for more freedom to explore stylistic avenues because what can come across as tedious in a traditional, longer essay becomes a fresh, creative stylistic choice in our compressed writing. What are some of the stylistic options open to us? Sky's the limit. To get you started this week we'll discuss our five favorite applications of style: vivid language, word count, unusual format, poetic components, and topic choice.
5. Radical Edit Fruit Cake
If you're like my mother, then you believe that more is merrier, especially when it came to making food for a party. Better to have too much, than not enough, shed sing from the kitchen, taking pan after pan out of the oven. Not so in Piece Of Cake, where we wont be making those giganto vanilla sheet cakes that they serve for the masses at church socials. Instead we'll be dishing up much smaller, terribly concise, dense confections, so rich that one bite will be plenty. Two bites and you're a gonner. we'll start with more than we need, and then learn to whittle that baby down to a perfect bite-sized morsel. What is essential to our stories and what is excess? What does it mean to kill your darlings? That's the radical edit.
6. Red Velvet Revelation Cake
Literary nibbles need to fill us up. They need to feed us beyond a superficial level. How do we impart a sense of depth into these succinct essays? This week we're going to cut below the surface and answer that question. We'll talk about the importance of subtext, surprise, change, epiphany, and disclosure and about ways to incorporate them into our work to give the desired, satisfying effect of a richer, more layered prose. Tiny can be mighty.
7. Punchy Poundcake
This is no all-nighter. No seven course meal. There wont be seven bottles of wine to keep you perfectly fascinating. There isn't even a palette cleanser to get your taste buds ready. This is the eat and run folks, the cut and dash. You don't have two pages to set the stage and seduce the reader. You've got to get in and get out because you're about to drop a bomb. So get tight with an image, a voice or a central theme that will carry your piece to its finish. This is about being daring, coming on strong. Remember what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words? Choose a good one and you're on your way.
8. Tiramisu Truth or Consequences Cake
In the nonfiction kitchen we guarantee that our cakes are made from the hearty flour of truth, but we don't want them to be bricks either: we're not making weapons, we're making treats - and so we add the sugary, the buttery, the flavorful accent of memory and emotional truth to give our cake some spunk and meaning. In this lecture we will talk about emotional and factual truth, and how reality and perception can work together to make story happen.
9. Hidden Cherry Intuition Cake
Intuition is the perception of truth independent of any reasoning process. Its confidence in the unknown. Its heart not head. And listening to our intuition is an important part of writing, whatever its length. This week we're going to write without a recipe. Uninhibited by a formula or a preconceived outline, our words become powerful, skilled guides that lead us to the story we need to tell, not to the one we think we should be writing.
10. The Last Bite
Do you think you're ready to let the people eat cake? Lets get bold and send some of those slices out. In this lecture we'll talk about how to send, where to send and what to do while you wait.
to top of page | about Laurie Wagner | about Gretchen Clark | Student Comments
to top of page | about Laurie Wagner | about Gretchen Clark | Student Comments
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