Class Description
Creating a believable sense of Time is one of the novelist greatest triumphs and most painful of headaches. This course will offer an array of techniques to help keep your reader with you and use Time to its most significant effect. Through craft lectures, in-class reading of published works, as well as the sharing of personal writing and concerns, students will learn the art of pacing scenes and using summary, how to compress time within scenes and chapters and how to handle time jumps, as well as how to add emphasis to specific moments by slowing down. In addition, we will cover cinematic techniques important to fiction writers, such as scene cuts and the montage. By the end of the course, you will not only have gained a greater sense of time in reading the works of others but be able to grapple with Time’s difficulties in your own work. Students should bring thirteen copies of a 500-750 word scene or part of a scene-in-progress that they are having trouble with in terms of Time and pacing. You may also wish to bring your laptops or notebooks and a digital or printed copy of your novel-in-progress for personal reference. This course is part of a monthly series of 10 one-day classes for novelists at the beginning or more advanced stages of their manuscripts.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.