Workshop: After the First Draft with Sheila Heti
Workshop: After the First Draft with Sheila Heti
4 Sessions: Sundays, May 4, 11, 18, 25
11:00am-1:30pm ET
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, which have been translated into twenty-four languages. Many of her students have gone on to publish books of their own.
This class is for students who have completed a draft of a novel or a novella and would like to continue to work on it in the context of conversation, workshops, guidance, and mutual support. Each of the four sessions will focus on a different aspect of the art of revision, including character, structure, pacing, the beginning and ending, voice, and surprise.
Students will be put into smaller groups for more individual and closer readings of their work. The aim is to have a much better manuscript at the end of the month, clean and vital and unique and expressive of the writer.
Workshop Highlights:
Students are required to have a completed (or near-completed) draft of a novel that they intend to work on during this class.
There will be lots of time in class for dramatic revision and rethinking of the book, and time as well for elegant, smaller edits, in the context of conversation with others, and instructor-led exercises.
We will be working together in a non-competitive, supportive, warm, encouraging atmosphere.
This course has 2 scholarships available at a reduced fee of $200. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, April 25.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent book is Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. Her other books include Pure Colour (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), which The Atlantic called “unabashedly metaphysical,” Motherhood (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Vulture (#1 of 2018), NPR, Chicago Tribune, and others. Her novel, How Should a Person Be? (House of Anansi Press, 2010) was named one of the twelve “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year in The New Yorker, and was cited by Time as "one of the most talked-about books of the year.” Her other fiction includes the novel Ticknor (House of Anansi, 2005) described by Publisher’s Weekly as “deliciously intimate and clue-riddled as a Poe story;” and the short story collection, The Middle Stories (House of Anansi, 2004). Heti was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times book critics, a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.
