NVL 29 — Novel Writing Without Tears
Quarter: Spring
Day(s): Thursdays
Course Format: Live Online (About Formats)
Duration: 10 weeks
Date(s): Apr 1—Jun 3
Time: 6:30—9:20 pm (PT)
Refund Deadline: Apr 3
Units: 3
Tuition: $675
Instructor(s): Valerie Brelinski
Limit: 22
Status: Open
Spring
Date(s)
Apr 1—Jun 3
10 weeks
Refund Date
Apr 3
3 Units
Fees
$675
Instructor(s):
Valerie Brelinski
Limit
22
Open
Does the idea of writing a novel seem both exciting and terrifying? Are you equally thrilled and daunted at the prospect of trying to turn your story ideas into something resembling a book-length manuscript? This course will help relieve your fears by showing you just how a novel is organized and by dividing the novel-writing process into manageable portions of writing. Our weekly mini-lessons will teach you how to recognize your own story’s inciting incident, raise its physical and emotional stakes, and shape its raw material into a cohesive, tension-raising structure, while our daily writing exercises will give you practice in creating fascinating, plot-provoking characters and settings that do much more than describe time and place. We will workshop sections from our emergent novels, and also hone those all-important, agent-attracting opening pages. In addition, we will closely examine the novel The North Water by Ian McGuire, and receive expert instruction from Donald Maass’s craft book, Writing the Breakout Novel. No matter how incipient your novel-writing desire (or entrenched your fear!), this course will provide you with the tools and confidence to help bring your dream novel to fruition.
Valerie Brelinski, Former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer, Stanford
Valerie Brelinski is the author of the novel The Girl Who Slept with God. She is currently finishing her first memoir, Minimum Security, an examination of her first husband’s incarceration for bank robbery. Her shorter writing has been published in Vogue, More, Salon, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fiction, The Rumpus, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Brelinski has taught creative writing at Stanford, UC Davis, and the University of Virginia, where she received an MFA in fiction writing.Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction (ISBN 1599634007)
(Required) Ian McGuire, The North Water (ISBN 125011814X)
(Required) Ian McGuire, The North Water (ISBN 125011814X)