Pen on Fire 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.
The dream of a writer is to write like their pen is on fire. To burn through pages with confidence and finesse. But we often put all kinds of obstacles in our own path, slowing us down and robbing us of the freedom we need.
Perhaps you’re stuck with starting a project, or unhappy with your progress, or you need inspiration to put some gas in your tank, or you want to stretch some under-used muscles. Or you want the support of a teacher and like-minded writers.
This course provides techniques and tricks and insights that help you push past your worst internal roadblocks, so you can fly through your writing on a daily basis.
Notes
This is a cross-genre course, applicable to any kind of prose writing.
This course introduces you to techniques and tricks and insights that help you surmount obstacles to your writing path.
Course components:
- Lectures
- Writing exercises
- Workshopping of student projects (each student presenting work two times)
Pen on Fire is for beginners or anyone who wants to brush up on the fundamentals.
Course Syllabus
- Confidence: Letting go of disclaimers. Finding compassion for yourself. The differences between freewriting vs. journaling and the benefits of each.
- Rituals: Finding what works for you. Identifying your strengths. Visiting with your work.
- Playing to your strengths: Choosing the right genre. Throat clearing, vamping, and prevaricating. Breaking through resistance to tell the story you want to tell.
- Obstacle of the Self: Getting out of your own way. What are the obstacles you most frequently impose on yourself? Discovering them, developing tactics to get rid of them, and preventing new ones from appearing.
- The Inside Story: Whose story is it, anyway? Who is the narrator? Who is driving the action? Paring away all distractions and focusing on who is telling this story.
- The Finer Points of Revision: Where to start when you feel lost. Things to keep an eye out for. Creating a plot board.
- Where are you going? Where have you been?: How your past influences your thinking about your work. Setting goals. Using compassion and poetry to grow your writing.
- Marketplace Madness: To publish or not to publish? Putting yourself out there. Surviving the business of writing with your psyche intact.
- No MFA Needed Here: What are the elements of an MFA program that could help you grow your writing? Finding them in your community and your life. Connecting to the literary world.
- Persevering: Handling rejection. Minimizing rejection. Techniques for persistence and perseverance.
About
- The Online classes bring students from all over the globe to Gotham—New York City’s most famous writing school.
- The Online classes happen asynchronously—not in “real time.” You can participate in class any time, day or night, but the classes advance week-by-week, and certain things should be accomplished within that week-long session.
- You can take an Online writing class from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. The majority of our Online students are located in the U.S. but we also draw students from practically every country in the world.
- Tech support will be available.
- Aside from the convenience of time and location, you have a record of everything that transpires in class, which you can print out and keep for future reference. (The material is text and image, not video.)
