Writing Everyday Life with Bruna Dantas Lobato

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

In this six-session course, students will learn how to amplify the mundane and find details worth rendering in their daily lives.

How can we make the ordinary interesting? How can we shape and structure the passing of time and experience? How do we turn moments of stillness or even boredom into compelling stories? What makes an anecdote or story interesting or worth telling? This class will answer these questions and focus on some tools to help us notice the world around us, identify the forces that drive us and our days, and craft a successful “quiet story.”

Stories, novel excerpts, poems, and memoirs will serve as blueprints to help us find the right structures to shape our narratives.

Beginners are welcome, and previous workshop experience is NOT required in this class. This is an open workshop, where writers are welcome to talk about their process, experiences, and literary tastes to help generate informed feedback, as seen in Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping.

Course Outline

• Tuesday 12/5: Introduction
• Thursday 12/7: The Shape of a Story
• Tuesday 12/12: The Purpose of Drama
• Thursday 12/14: The Purpose of Style
• Tuesday 12/19: Workshop 1
• Thursday 12/21: Workshop 2

Capacity: 20