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You had the impulse, you wrote the first draft in a rush of raw creativity, and maybe you even worked on a second (or third) draft, but you know it’s not finished. What next? “Many beginning and emerging writers find revision confusing, demoralizing, or even downright impossible,” says instructor Heather June Gibbons. “You might avoid revision for fear of losing the authenticity and power of the original. You might be open to revision, but find the actual process frustratingly ambiguous. Whatever the case, and whatever you write—whether fiction, memoir, poetry, or scripts—this one-day intensive will teach you new ways to approach, develop and revise your writing.
"Working with your existing drafts in class, you’ll apply practical techniques like expanding and deepening at the level of the sentence, changing point of view, and increasing tension and suspense by knowing when to slow down and when to leap ahead. In addition to the nuts and bolts, you’ll learn fresh approaches to the process overall that will help you keep re-seeing, and thus effectively revising, your work on your own. Crazy as it sounds, you might even find that revision is fun—or, at the very least, you’ll find that it’s possible.”
Participants should plan to bring two short drafts, one they think needs significant work, and one that seems closer to being done. Both stand-alone pieces and beginnings of longer projects (no excerpts that start in the middle, please) are welcome. So that we may get to them all in the time allotted, please adhere to the following length requirements: poetry should be no longer than three pages, prose (fiction/essay/memoir) should be no longer than seven pages, and scripts should be no longer than ten pages.