Building an Author Marketing Plan That Attracts Readers, Sells Books, and Won’t Make You Miserable It’s no one’s favorite part of publishing, but establishing some kind of public-facing presence (marketing) is essential for writers today. So let’s talk about how …
Category: Classes
Review of Lawrence Wright’s Novel The End of October
By Nicholas O’Connell Talk about prescient. Lawrence Wright’s new novel, The End of October, appeared in April, 2020, right as COVID-19 exploded across the U.S. and world. A medical thriller, the novel tells the story of a fictional pandemic …
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The Perfect Pitch: Story Ideas in Writing Classes
THE PERFECT PITCH: STORY IDEAS IN WRITING CLASSES Narrative writers organize their books and shorter pieces in terms of a story or chronology, probably the oldest and most compelling way of relating information. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. …
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The Writing Life: Seattle Writing Classes
In her essay collection, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as a habit of art. I discuss this approach in The Writer’s Workshop talk on The Writing Life, on Wednesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. in room 221 at …
Take a Journey with a Traveler’s Tale
If you love to travel like I do, you’ve probably found the last six months a challenging time. After canceling my Travel Writing class in Spain and an assignment to ski in Austria, I have hunkered down at home to …
Summer Reads for Tumultuous Times from The Writer’s Workshop
In these tumultuous times, it seems hard to imagine how things can return to normal. How can we get through Covid, police brutality, protests, riots, high unemployment and general malaise? One of the best ways to find hope in dark …
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Book Promotion During a Pandemic
Book Promotion During a Pandemic Promoting a book is challenging enough in normal times. Doing this during a pandemic makes it even more problematic. Nevertheless, it can be done successfully, according to Molly Woolbright, the publicist at Sasquatch Books, …
Best Books to Read During Covid Pandemic
If there’s any silver lining to this Covid 19 scourge, it may be that people now have time to read and write. Some people are writing about how their lives have changed. Others are writing about anything but Covid, relishing …
How To Write a Page Turner
Scenic writing animates some of the most moving, satisfying, sophisticated works of literature as I teach in my Seattle writing classes and other writing classes. It quickly brings readers into the story because it helps create a world, a world …
Jeff Smoot Reads at The Writer’s Workshop Seattle Writing Classes
I take great pride in seeing the students in my Seattle writing classes succeed. One of these students, Jeff Smoot, wrote the memoir, Hang Dog Days, which recently earned a runner up for the Banff Mountain Festival Book Award and …
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First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
Ray Bradbury
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“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
Anne Lamott
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. Naipaul -
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O’Connor
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Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.
Willa Cather
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The Writer's Workshop, an on-campus and online program offering writing
classes in Seattle, online and travel writing classes.