Where does your writing come from? How can you access the deeper realms? In this class, we will experiment with different forms of meditation and visualization, in service of our writing. Meditation can help to calm anxieties and remove obstacles.
Do you need structure, deadlines, insight, and a creative community to produce your best work? This eight-week, multi-genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry) online writing group is designed to provide that and more.
An entertaining picture of this most visceral of musical traditions will emerge through our consideration of CDs, DVDs, musical analysis, and contemporary documents. The swashbuckling careers of Liszt, Rubinstein, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Paganini will be placed in the context of the evolution of the virtuoso concerto.
Audiences love to see heroes who are thrown into tailspins then manage to snatch surprising victories. Learn how to test your character’s noble cause, their beliefs, and their very identity with story-driving twists that keep audiences riveted.
The Shari‘a represents the totality of religious, legal and moral guidelines, the will of God for human life as a whole. It serves as the guiding framework for Muslims in their quest for a harmonious life with the rest of the universe.
It’s easy to get lost when revising your manuscript for publishing consideration, but there’s good news: the synopsis, pitch, and query letter that accompany your submission can also serve as your GPS through the revision process! Fine-tune these tools in this hands-on workshop to take control and fine-tune your manuscript.
Just as in real life, characters are defined by their internal conflicts and their most crucial relationships. In this class, we’ll deploy internal character contradictions and shape-shifting antagonists to enrich your characters, theme, and story.
This course will introduce you to creative writing, from generating ideas to revising drafts. Find your voice and develop your craft through in-class and at-home writing exercises, and through discussions of your own and your fellow students’ written work.
This literary form of letter writing, which traces back to the Roman lyric poet Horace, has continued to evolve and grow in popularity, enriching prose writing as well.
Distinguishing Characters will focus on writing characters, including unreliable narrators. Over four weeks, we will look at characters through literary examples from Edwidge Dandicat, Arundhati Roy, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Tana French, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Gregory David Roberts.
This course will introduce you to the art of writing creative nonfiction, a wonderfully flexible and diverse genre. Try your hand at writing literary journalism, memoir, and the personal essay.
Improve your writing for greater clarity, organization, and persuasiveness. The University of Chicago’s Writer’s Studio invites you to take our Effective Writing for Business and the Professions course for better communication in business and beyond.
For new or longtime novelists, this workshop-based class provides expert direction, discussions of craft and form, and the opportunity to workshop novel excerpts.
No class on April 8.
We'll look at some excellent short stories and discuss why they work, with an eye toward further developing our own works-in-progress. How is the story structured? What essential elements of character, voice, action, and detail bring the story to life?
How do adult authors create compelling young adult voices? Try your hand at writing pieces that truly resonate with twelve to eighteen-year-old readers. Explore how YA fiction writers craft memorable and realistic voices through clever (but not too clever) banter, point of view, and cadence.
Do you need structure, deadlines, insight, and a creative community to produce your best work? This eight-week, multi-genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry) online writing group is designed to provide that and more.
So often we write as if we are pure brain with access to a keyboard. In truth, the inescapable body holds much wisdom. In this class, we will consider, as writers: What does the body know? What does the body have to tell?
Audiences watch movies and read fiction hoping to be blown away; to go on emotional journeys so powerful they linger as lived experience. Learn to bind audience to story by building strong character identification and skillful story catharsis.
How do you discover your strongest story or essay material? And once you have done so, how do you make each draft stronger than the last?
Powerful stories are emotional journeys with unforgettable characters who struggle and grow. We’ll focus on establishing internal, cohesive story logic and controlling audience experience with unanswered questions, surprises, and satisfying payoffs.
This course is a rare opportunity for the general public to study and write with University of Chicago Professor of English and Creative Writing Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy.
There is a long and varied history of the writer as flanuer- the passionate wanderer. Sometimes the writing that follows is transformed by the very act of walking or deepened by discoveries made along the way, but it is always changed by looking at one’s environment anew.
Long works such as memoirs and novels must sustain voice, action, and reader interest for the duration. This course will address the unique challenges and opportunities of long-form prose, both fiction and creative nonfiction.
Where do ideas come from? Maybe from a half-remembered image from a dream. Or a sentence that forms in your head while you’re choosing apples in the grocery store. In this class, we will concentrate on chasing and catching such glimmers in our days and nights.
When children are your readers, play is paramount (and adults often love it, too!). In this session, we’ll explore how to bring play to the page in a way that connects with young audiences.
Do you need structure, deadlines, insight, and a creative community to produce your best work? This eight-week, multi-genre (fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry) online writing group is designed to provide that and more.
The Writer's Studio Monthly Writing Group is designed for students working in creative nonfiction or fiction. Focused on monthly workshops, the group also provides writers a sense of community as well as an outlet for discussion of both practice and form.
Ten-minute play festivals are happening all over the country. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals needed to write solid short plays. We will also examine how other writers have achieved success with this abbreviated art form.
Stay motivated while writing your novel! This online class will offer craft discussions, intensive study of a mentor text, instructor feedback on a synopsis and eighty pages of work, and opportunities for revision.
Your story's beginning must capture and commit your audience to your tale. We'll explore how to launch your story unforgettably into audience imaginations through crafting deeply written characters and devising structure that satisfies and snares.
Contemporary readers and audiences expect today’s heroes to operate in a morally ambiguous universe and be themselves flawed. We are fascinated when these broken heroes rise above their situation and their flaws to demonstrate unexpected nobility.