Surgery on the Sentence Level with Omer Friedlander

You’ve been told this story begins too late. Well, where should it begin and what does that new first paragraph look like? You’ve been told that the pacing is too slow in the middle section of your novel; how do you speed things up? We will get down to the difficult business of tearing open your story, moving things around, and patching it up again. We will also discuss the revision process more broadly by reading interviews with published writers and learning from their routines, techniques, and craft tricks.

Course overview

In this class, students will bring in drafts of their own work-in-progress for a live workshop edit. We will focus on the prose: the paragraph, the sentence, the word, the letter, the phoneme. We will talk about the speeds and flows of narrative time (scene, summary, gap), as well as the texture of language, voice, rhythm, and musicality, among other things. We’ll discuss the kind of feedback you get in workshop and how to tackle it on the page.

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