Does the tangle of story seem daunting? Not fitting into pre-cooked and conventional forms? Work with me in ways organic to your story at its deepest levels.

 

News, 1, 2, 3, on forthcoming creative writing workshops with Anya Achtenberg:

1. Essential Elements of Story workshop course starting early October.

2. Custom-Made Story, for deep organic work to expand your fiction/nonfiction into coherence and breathable structures, soon to follow Essential Elements.

And

3. Announcing once-a-month standalone workshops, multi-genre and generative of new writing—schedule coming soon, see below!

Dear writers!

Being present in our writing, with commitment, joy, engagement, and a view toward writing regularly, revising brilliantly, and completing our manuscripts, our books, our projects; feels all the more urgent to me, and I hear the same push in many writers I speak with. As I work to complete two long-in-progress manuscripts, a novel History Artist, and a book of poetry entitled land in water rise in flame, both with hybrid elements—I am excited to work with writers who love to go new places in their art, and love to complete their works.

More on the classes and workshops I am offering to finish out this year and go deeply and passionately into next year:

1) In October I’ll be teaching Finding the Real Story: Essential Elements of Story in Fiction and Memoir/Creative Nonfiction (hybrid forms welcome!!).

Start date Wednesday, October 4 (or 11, depending on timely registration), 1:30-3:30pm Eastern Time (NY)               

For writers at all levels of experience. You’ll get:

• 10 rich written lectures to illuminate your understanding of the workings of story
• Weekly suggestions for writing explorations that generate new writing, help you revise old writing, and give grounded and expansive practice with the elements of story craft.
• 10 Zoom classes of substance, each one to follow after the weekly lectures
• Deep individual critiques, both written and in live Zoom discussion, from me and from the other participants
• Help to develop the kinds of structures that would serve your stories

Elements addresses some of the larger issues of writing story through work on essential elements of narrative; goes beyond mechanical/conventional approaches to craft, and limiting prescriptive definitions of story elements; and helps you bring forward new writings and illuminating revisions that embody the deeper truths and powerful emotions moving your story.

Elements will strengthen the tools of craft you already have, and encourage new approaches to find your work’s coherence at deeper levels. The critiques and lectures will help you work into the stubborn knots and potent concealed places that reveal the story; develop characters that breathe, surprise, and speak dialogue that moves the story.

—Elements will help you open into language that not only works, but amazes.

Elements covers:

discovering narrator[s] and point[s] of view; the unfolding of plot; deepening subtext and letting it work for the story; context and simultaneity; dialogue; the music of prose; the story’s metaphor and its organizational power; revision; and stepping into structure for your story.

You will work with the mystery of human behavior in story form, to deepen characterization and discover plot rather than be constricted by it. Work with the mix of truth and fiction that creates a world both imagined and real. Elements will challenge you to grow the best possible narrator[s] for each story. We’ll explore narrative summary, active scene and dialogue; begin new stories and discover ways to complete old ones. Generative suggestions come to you each week for writing explorations that open and develop your writing while exploring the elements of story.
We share our work and thinking about craft in an atmosphere both supportive and challenging, attuned to the needs of each participant, to get and give powerful and useful feedback.               

Cost: $600.                                                                                                                                                                                $575 for those who sign up by September 30

Course caps at 12 participants maximum.     

To register or for more information: Contact me at my email aachtenberg at gmail                   

News on Custom-Made Story to follow very soon—                                                                                             Contact me to get on the list for the next round of  Custom-Made Story.

Schedule coming soon for my monthly standalone workshops, including:                                         Say it. Dígalo:  Jumping the chasm between what we see and what we say

I’ll be back to you this week!

Anya Achtenberg Sefara-Rabi

Story form can be surprising–let me help you get your elements together!