Advanced Novel Workshop
One-Week Workshop
June 8–13

It’s a daunting enterprise. There’s so much a novelist must get right, especially in the first few chapters: characters need to be introduced, a suitable tone or voice established, plot lines begun, themes set forth, a sense of place evoked. All novelists—even the ones you most admire—struggle to gain perspective on their work. This course will help you achieve perspective and answer the fundamental question: what’s working here, and what’s not. It is a workshop class for serious student writers who have begun or even finished a novel draft and now wish to share their work (20 pages, preferably a first or early chapter in the book) with the instructor and a group of other novelists. Expect your novel chapter to be closely read and carefully considered by both the instructor and the group. The tone of the discussion will be frank, constructive, encouraging. By week’s end you’ll come away from the class with a list of specific recommendations for improving your novel and a surer sense of how good novels work. 

Novel Craft: Essential Knowledge For Developing Your Novel
Weekend Workshop
June 14–15

Creating a novel is an enormously complex and time-consuming enterprise. The goal of this course is to offer a wealth of practical advice on how to plan, structure and write a novel. In this weekend craft seminar (not a workshop) we’ll explore all the essential elements: character, plot, language, point of view, setting. We’ll study the specific qualities that make a first chapter irresistible to a reader. We’ll read and discuss a novel that demonstrates an unusually high level of fiction craft. We’ll consider an array of first chapters from recently published novels. Expect useful handouts and carefully articulated lectures. This will be a lively and challenging class for new writers who are struggling to begin or complete a first novel. 

Biography
John Dalton (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) is the author of the novel Heaven Lake (Scribner), winner of the Barnes and Noble 2004 Discover Award in fiction. Heaven Lake also received the Sue Kaufman Prize for best first fiction of 2004 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John’s short fiction has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Story, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.