Year Long Novel Generator: The Indescribable Novel with Hilary Leichter
Year Long Novel Generator: The Indescribable Novel with Hilary Leichter
26 Sessions: every other Tuesday, October 1, 2024-September 23, 2025
6:00-8:30pm ET
Hilary Leichter
12 students, payment plans available. Note: This is an application-based workshop. Please do not register until you been accepted into the course.
Hilary Leichter is the author of the novels Temporary and Terrace Story. She has been a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Prize, and her work in Harper's Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. Terrace Story was named a best book of 2023 by Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. She teaches at Columbia University, where she is the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies for Creative Writing.
Are you working on a book and you’re not exactly sure how to talk about it? Do you occasionally call it a “thing” or a “thingy”? Is it not quite a Bildungsroman, almost a family epic, and sort of a novel-in-stories? Is it nearly speculative, or casually satirical, but also earnest and realist? Is it experimental, but does it also sound like your favorite Modernist writers? When people ask you to describe it, do you break into a cold sweat and start grasping for words that aren’t quite right? Who are these people, asking you to describe your book thingy? Rude! Don’t worry: it’s none of their business. The thing about using tired language, trends, and buzzwords to talk about your art is that you’ll end up writing something you can describe. And what’s the point of that? If you can easily describe your novel before it’s written, why do you need to write it in the first place? You'll find the right shelf for your book when it's done.
In this year-long novel generator, you’ll take your book from its earliest stages and push it toward a full manuscript. We will resist the overdetermination of our work, and resist describing what does not yet exist, instead allowing your projects to teach you what they are, and how they want to be written. Bi-weekly workshops will include generative craft talks and engagement with texts that challenge, expand, and evolve the form.
Workshop Highlights:
Meet editors, agents, and industry professionals
Benefit from one-on-one meetings with the instructor
Make significant progress on their novels before the end of the year
To apply, please send a writing sample of approximately five double-spaced pages from the novel-in-progress you hope to workshop in this class, along with a short statement (250 words) telling me about the project. Just a few short sentences—any longer than that, and I’m afraid we’ll unmake what hasn’t even been made. Don’t worry—whatever your book is or isn’t, it’s none of my business. Please submit all materials to kate@theshipmanagency.com by Monday, September 2 to be considered for the course.
1 full scholarship available. For information, and to learn about payment plans, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
Hilary Leichter is the author of the novel Temporary (Coffee House Press, 2020), which was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Temporary was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named a best book of 2020 by NPR, Elle, Vulture, and Publishers Weekly. Her new novel, Terrace Story, will be published by Ecco in August 2023. Hilary’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Conjunctions and elsewhere. Her work in Harper’s Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was the summer 2022 Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University.
