Sign up for Writing Classes

Writing classes can help you put down what really happened with detail, deftness and precision. A good writing class provides the encouragement, skillful guidance, and sound, practical advice to master the craft of writing. Otherwise, writers can flounder for years, repeating mistakes over and over again, turning what should be a rewarding and enlightening activity into an exercise in frustration.

Experienced authors can benefit from the structure a writing class provides to perfect and extend their technique. The Writer’s Workshop offers a variety of writing courses and online writing tutorials to meet the needs of a wide range of writers. Let me know if you have questions about the right class for you. I look forward to hearing from you!

You can purchase all of the course texts through Elliott Bay Book Company You can purchase copies of my books there as well.

Yours,

Nicholas O’Connell, MFA, Ph.D.
206-284-7121

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Nonfiction Writing Classes

Narrative Writing Classes

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Novel Writing Classes

Young Adult Writing Classes

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Poetry Writing Classes

Introduction to Poetry Writing
$500

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Get it down. Take chances.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.

William Faulkner

The forms of things unknown and the the poet’s pen…

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

One false word, one extra word…

One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.

Patricia Marx

There are only two or three human stories.

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

Writing a novel is a terrible experience.

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

Just follow your hero.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!

Ray Bradbury

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world.

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

Literature is nothing but carpentry.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pleasure in a good novel…

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

…with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

Ernest Hemingway

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Barbara Kingsolver

The difference between the right word and the almost right word…

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Mark Twain

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.

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