Writing Workshops

The Scene and the Summary: Writing Effective Scenes in Memoir and Personal Essay with David McLoghlin

$495

8 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT January 11 to February 29, 2024

Online via Zoom

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This workshop has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Randy Winston at [email protected].

This course will focus on the crucial difference between scenes and summaries. Summaries compress time, delivering crucial information, often background or linking material between scenes. Scenes imitate real time, describing action or conflict in immersive fashion. What this will do is enliven and energize your writing, by helping you to understand when you should be “showing” (scenes) and “telling” (summaries). Both are vital, and applicable to fiction and nonfiction. We will also look at teasing out the story we need to tell, crafting a narrative voice, and how to use time effectively in memoir. Other topics will include pacing our story, characterisation and dialogue. The workshop portion of class will assist you in the art of positive and supportive critique, leading you to form literary friendships and find future readers for your work. If you’re interested in writing your personal story by mastering that core element of craft, the scene, then this class is for you.

Course Outline

With the exception of the first class, half of each class will be dedicated to questions of craft; the other half will be dedicated to workshopping your writing. You will learn the following:

How to create authentic scenes, and summaries, or “glides”: scenes happen in an approximation of real time; summaries or “glides” are the informative linking material between scenes that compress time, summarizing days or years.
How to find the throughline in your story.
When to “show” and when to “tell.” Both are necessary.
How to create authentic dialogue.
How to create three dimensional characterizations of real people on the page, avoiding ghost characters.
How to pace your story and polish the narrative arc
How to use time in memoir by moving between present and past in a convincing way without confusing the reader.
How to find your narrative voice. This is a crafted version of you “pulled from the raw material of a life” (V. Gornick, The Situation and the Story).
How to establish the narrator’s present life and what is at stake in terms of the past.
How to learn to distinguish between the situation, or scene, at hand and the deeper story.
To research the times you lived in, interview relatives and relations, read in ways that deepen your project in terms of historical and cultural contexts.
To identify psychological and ethical challenges regarding how to include other people’s stories while expressing your own truth.

Books we will read and study*

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Relations: An Anthology of African and Diaspora Voices, edited by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond (creative nonfiction, essays and memoir extracts)
Townie by Andre Dubus II
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi

With periodic reference to

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, by Melissa Febos
The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts
The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick
The Anti-Racist Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John Mcphee

*Extracts will be provided.

Led by

David McLoghlin

David McLoghlin

David McLoghlin is a prize-winning poet and writer of memoir and personal essay. His books are Waiting For Saint Brendan and Other Poems and Santiago Sketches. His third book, Crash Centre, will be published in May 2024 by Salmon Poetry. Apart from a major bursary (grant) for memoir from Ireland’s Arts Council, and a personal essay published in the anthology Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press), he has published personal essays, short stories and memoir extracts in The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and other journals. An essay on being mentored by poet Sharon Olds is forthcoming in This Glistening Verb (University of Michigan Press) as part of their “Under Discussion” series. He is currently at work on a book about his grandfather, the golf architect, Eddie Hackett, widely considered “the Father of Irish Golf Design.” In October 2023 he played one of his grandfather’s designs, Connemara Golf Links, and is writing an immersion piece for Golfer’s Journal in the USA. He has previously taught memoir for The Center for Fiction, and teaches creative writing in Ireland with The American College, Dublin, Poetry as Commemoration and Writers in Schools. While living in New York between 2010 and 2020 he was Resident Writer at Hunts Point Alliance for Children in the South Bronx, and an NYU Teaching Fellow at Coler Specialty Hospital; and a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship Recipient (2023).

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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