Craft Seminar: The End...or Is It? Finishing Your Book with Maria Dahvana Headley
Craft Seminar: The End...or Is It? Finishing Your Book with Maria Dahvana Headley
2 Sessions: Sundays, February 9 + 16
2:00-4:00pm ET
Maria Dahvana Headley
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times Bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, including The Mere Wife, and Beowulf, a New Translation, dozens of short stories, an eight hour musical version of the Aeneid, play and TV scripts, epic poems, and...some projects that never made it out into the world, but might have, had she taken this class.
This class is for anyone who has a writing project they can't finish. Trunk novels, scripts that fell apart halfway, poems that died for lack of clarity, that one idea for a book you've been mulling for twenty years. All are welcome, in any form or genre!
This is a craft seminar about getting to The End. I know as well as anyone does that it's possible to write almost a whole novel, only to discover that you have no idea what your novel is about, and that you have no idea how to get it done. Worse yet, sometimes it's possible to fall out of love with a viable project, and end up staring at a pile of pages, unable to muster your courage to go back in. Is it possible to resurrect an abandoned novel and actually finish it? How can you reinvigorate yourself to get to the end of a manuscript, when you've lost your vigor somewhere along the long, dark writing road? This class is a solution-based generative workshop in which we'll each choose one of our own projects, and then relearn, through writing exercises, plotting exercises, and editing exercises, how to get to the finish line. We'll address re-inspiration, tools for redirecting your creativity toward completion rather than twitchy revision of two chapters, and everything else a writer needs to get a project completed, at long last.
Workshop Highlights:
Writing exercises to reinvigorate passion for a project that's been dormant
We'll work with tools to clarify what the project is actually about, and why it's still interesting
One of my superpowers is reverse engineering structure from theme, so we'll go deep into tools for creating an ending and actually getting there using the themes of your core story.
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, January 31.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times-bestselling, World Fantasy and Hugo Award-winning author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (MCD x FSG, 2020), which is taught at universities all over the world, and won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. The Mere Wife (MCD x FSG, 2018), a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf, was named by the Washington Post as one of its Notable Works of Fiction in 2018, and is currently in development at F/X. She’s written in a variety of genres and forms - memoir, short stories, criticism, poetry, scripts, lyrics and more - her ten-part musical adaptation of The Aeneid, Vergil: A Mythological Musical, came out in 2023 from Audible. She has a novel about creation myths and queer history upcoming from FSG.
