Writing Workshops

How She Wrote: Discovering Joan Didion's Craft with Alissa Wilkinson (October 2024)

$295

4 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Saturdays, 1:30 pm EDT - 3:30 pm EDT October 12 to November 2, 2024

The Center for Fiction

Writer Joan Didion, full length portrait, 1970. Credit: Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times

Writers love Joan Didion’s work for all kinds of reasons — her insights, her descriptions, her wicked sense of humor. But what can we learn about the craft of writing from Didion’s work? After all, she often said that the way a writer says things is even more revealing than what they say.

In this workshop, we’ll take a close look at Didion’s essays, discovering the ways she approached specific challenges. Then we’ll try her methods out for ourselves. We’ll focus on some of Didion’s lesser-known writing in order to approach it with fresh eyes. We’ll let Didion teach us how to write.

Course Outline:

Week 1: Creating a narrator
Week 2: Setting the scene
Week 3: Describing your world
Week 4: Finding your ending

This course is held in person at The Center for Fiction.

Featured Photo: Writer Joan Didion, full-length portrait, 1970. Credit: Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times. https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002w3wq

Led by

Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at the New York Times. Her book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, is forthcoming from Liveright in early 2025. She’s been writing criticism since 2005, and her work has appeared in Vox, the New York Times Book Review, Vulture, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Review of Books, RogerEbert.com, Books & Culture, and many more. Her previous book, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking and Living from Revolutionary Women, was published by Broadleaf in 2022. She earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University and an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University.

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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