Jumpstart Your Novel

(WSP 155)

This workshop is for students who are ready to begin writing a novel or who have hit some roadblocks along the way. It is also for the student who has a fledgling idea for a novel and doesn’t know how to develop it. In this one-day course, we will tackle essential novel-writing questions including: Is my novel idea big enough? Interesting enough? How much do I need to plan before I begin writing? What point of view should I use? Are my characters well-developed enough? Do I know who they are and how they will change? Do I need to know where I am heading in this story? How much plot do I need to know? And finally, How will I write this novel? By the end of the day, students will discover how pre-writing can help them bring their novel ideas into focus and prepare them for first draft writing.

Ellen Sussman, Lecturer in Continuing Studies

Ellen Sussman is the author of the novel, On a Night Like This, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. She has taught at Pepperdine, UCLA, and Rutgers University. Her book, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex, was published by Bloomsbury in 2008. Her anthology, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, was published by W. W. Norton in 2007 and became a New York Times Editors’ Choice.