Memoir Writing I is a 10-week workshop, which includes lectures, exercises, and the critiquing of student projects. It’s for beginners or anyone who wants to brush up on the fundamentals. Farther down, you can view a syllabus for this course.
Every life holds many tales. Whether your life is wildly unconventional or relatively normal, there’s bound to be something fascinating about it. That’s why the contemporary memoir—everyday people telling their stories—has become such a popular phenomenon. A memoir covers an aspect of a life, whether it’s a short piece about, say, a bicycle ride with a friend, or a book about, say, your entire childhood.
To make readers care, your memoir must be told with the finesse of fiction. Here you will learn techniques for focusing your life stories, as well as well as writing craft and how to market your work.
Whether you seek to write essay-length pieces or a book, we’ll show you how to best tell the stories from your life.
This course gives you a firm grounding in the basics of fiction craft and gets you writing a short story (or two) or a novel. Course components:
- Lectures
- Writing exercises
- Workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times)
New York City/Zoom classes
- The syllabus varies from teacher to teacher, term to term. Many topics will be similar to those covered in the Online classes.
About
- Zoom classes happen in real time.
- The Zoom classes unite students from all over the world at Gotham—New York City’s most well-established writing school.
- The Zoom classes happen on videoconference, in “real time.” Very much like an in-person class except everyone is on a computer or device in their own space. The Zoom software is free and simple to use.
- You can take a Zoom writing class from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. The majority of our Zoom students are located in the U.S. but we also draw students from practically every country in the world.
- Tech support will be available. Out of respect for everyone’s privacy, the Zoom sessions are not recorded.
