| The Long Haul: Seeing Your Book Through to Completion (Online)

Navigate the journey of writing, completing & publishing your book with renowned author Ron Currie Jr. guiding you through the challenges and triumphs of authorship.

Anyone can start a novel; that’s when it’s fun, exciting, all possibilities and no problems. For about fifty pages, the thing practically writes itself—and then something happens.  Narrative difficulties emerge and accumulate. Doubt creeps in. You falter or quit altogether.

This is not merely a common experience among novelists of all levels of experience and accomplishment; it’s a universal one. I believe in a holistic approach to writing as a  practical matter—you may be the second coming of Tolstoy, but no one will ever know it if you can’t, or won’t, get any writing done. The writers who succeed and bring their books in for a landing share two things in common: they prioritize their work over everything else,  and they utilize common strategies for dealing with the roadblocks all writers encounter.

In this workshop, each session will open with a conversation about how writing went the previous week, a writing exercise, and a discussion of an assigned section from John  Gardner’s seminal text On Becoming a Novelist. In addition, the class will workshop early chapters from the students’ own novels.

Although issues of craft will be discussed, the primary goal of this workshop is to teach students what’s required to see a novel through to completion and how to arrange our lives and mental space to best facilitate our writing. To this end, we’ll discuss the mindset of writing, prioritizing work against the myriad of internal and external pressures,  overcoming the fear of making one’s writing public, and other pertinent topics.

Books by instructor Ron Currie Jr.