This advanced workshop will be devoted to the novel. What makes a novel? How do novels work? Most important, how do we write one? Participants will arrive with a novel in prospect (in other words, an idea) or even a novel already in progress, will produce a minimum of eight draft pages per week, and will have their novels-in-progress workshopped by the group. In addition we will read at least three canonical novels of the past century to see what we can learn about why they succeed. Each participant’s goal will be as much of a rough draft as possible of his or her novel-in-progress.
Sample reading list:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Reading/Writing assignments:
5-8 manuscript pages per week of individual projects; weekly reading of the published novel under discussion; weekly reading of the workshop submission under discussion.
