How to Build a Novel with Eli Zuzovsky

This writing workshop has sold out. Please email [email protected] to join the waitlist—and become a member for early access to future programming.

In this generative course, we’ll strip the novel down to its essential elements and apply the lessons we learn to our own writing. We’ll turn to literary masters—from Marcel Proust to Toni Morrison to Zadie Smith—to expand our understanding of how novels work. As we carefully consider our novel excerpts, we’ll ask ourselves what long-form fiction can do in our contemporary moment.

Each session will consist of two parts. We’ll start by weighing one key aspect of the craft, from the minute to the immense, including dialogue, point of view, and form. Our discussions will explore the work of classic and contemporary novelists, drawing, when useful, on artists working in kindred fields like theater and film. In each session’s second part, we’ll workshop our own novels-in-progress, taking advantage of the skills and insights we have gained.

While we’ll occasionally engage with theory, our focus will be practical. We’ll hone our ability to read like writers and think through experimentation. Our sessions will involve close readings and in-depth discussions of one another’s work.

Course Outline:

• Session 1 – Writer: Every novel needs a writer. We’ll begin our journey with the writers that we are and the ones we find inspiring. Sharing selected passages from our favorite novels, we’ll try to start putting our fingers on what it is that makes them work.
• Session 2 – Sentences: A novel is, essentially, a long sequence of sentences. But what, exactly, do we mean when we call a sentence “good?” We’ll dive into some of the sentence’s core elements, including rhythm, clarity, and pleasure.
• Session 3 – Detail: “Literature makes us better noticers of life,” writes James Wood. “We get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.” How do details accrete in prose to make meaning?
• Session 4 – Dialogue: What can we achieve through listening to conversations, their subtext, and the silences that they contain? We’ll learn from Annie Baker, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Duncan MacMillan, three contemporary masters of dramatic dialogue.
• Session 5 – Setting: In an age when many readers value stories for their so-called universality, what’s the importance of grounding our novels in the specificities of time and place? Does Anna Karenina, for instance, have to be set in late nineteenth-century Russia?
• Session 6 – Point of View: Whose story is this, anyway? And what difference does our narrative’s perspective make? We’ll juxtapose fiction in the third, second, and first person by authors like Jane Austen, David Foster Wallace, and Vladimir Nabokov.
• Session 7 – Characters: Using Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet as a case study, we’ll consider the uses—and abuses—of characters in fiction. How do we people our novels with imaginary yet convincing individuals? Why should readers even care about these people?
• Session 8 – Narrative: Is plot really “nothing,” as Grace Paley insisted? Should it be kept “under house arrest,” as Stephen King believes? We’ll weigh a spectrum of approaches to narration, analyzing texts by Charles Dickens, Toni Morrison, and Clarice Lispector.
• Session 9 – Form: Zooming out even further, we’ll discuss the different ways in which novelists experiment with structure, from James Joyce to J. M. Coetzee to Charles Yu. We’ll also touch on a host of related concepts, including genre, style, and mode.
• Session 10 – Readers: If we write a novel in a forest and no one is around to read it, does it make a sound? Our final session will revolve around the different paths to publication. We’ll explore the inner workings of the “industry,” from agents to publishers to editors.

Teaching Style: The course’s style will be both conversational and structured, attentive to the needs and interests of the group. Beyond our in-class workshop, each participant will receive detailed feedback on their work, including line edits, ideas for revision, and customized reading and viewing suggestions.

Level: Introductory

This course is held online via Zoom. Please note there will be no meeting on May 6th.