Online Course

Creative Nonfiction Boot Camp 10-Week

January 09 - March 19, 2023

Level Fundamentals

Kick-start your writing with our most popular class. Start that long-delayed project, develop essential writing habits with daily writing prompts, and reach your goals.

 

Additional Information

You want to do it. You mean to start that writing project … eventually. Now is the time to put excuses aside and start your writing project. Creative Nonfiction’s special boot camp sessions will do just that by providing firm deadlines, writing exercises, and weekly feedback. Along the way you’ll also develop the habit of writing regularly, which will serve you all year long (and well beyond!). After 10 weeks, if you’ve completed the minimum number of assignments, you’ll have an essay of between 4,000 and 8,000 words, or at least thirty passages to use as starting points for future essays.

Course Schedule

Week 1: Generating ideas

During this week we will focus on finding a topic or topics that you can feel passionate about as you begin to write, and ways to help your readers be as excited about your subject as you are. This week’s exercises will cover a wide variety of subject matter to help you explore several different possibilities for your writing focus. If you already have a subject in mind, you can forgo the exercises and simply write 300 words per day on your chosen subject.

Week 2: Your writing life

Finding time to write and overcoming your own doubts can be two of the biggest obstacles to moving ahead with your writing. This week’s lecture will discuss some practical approaches to addressing these problems, and the exercises will keep you writing through the week.

Week 3: Overcoming writer’s block 

Almost every writer experiences writer’s block at some point in his or her career, but the writers who actually go on to have a career are those who find ways to fight through. This week’s lecture will focus on the potential causes of and solutions to writer’s block, and the exercises will focus on ways to continue pieces you have already begun but are having trouble finishing.

Week 4: Stretching your limits

During this week we’ll discuss the ways in which experimenting with different factors—structure, unusual patterns of language, the timeline of an event—can help you to see your topic from a new angle and keep on writing. These same techniques can also bring new life to topics that are written about frequently, to help your piece stand out in the crowd. The exercises for this week will ask you to stretch your limits; you are also welcome to continue working on a longer piece instead of using the prompts.

Week 5: Review, re-mix, revise

This week we’ll consider ways in which returning to familiar subject matter can serve as a catalyst for creating new work.  Exercises will explore the hidden potential of well-worn subjects.

Week 6: Macro-editing

The lecture this week will begin a discussion of editing with a look at the larger building blocks from which an essay is constructed, common problems in using these elements, and ways to address those problems. We will consider elements such as pacing, structure, and description.

Week 7: Micro-editing

While the big-picture elements we discussed in Week 1 are important in creating an interesting and moving essay, sentence-level language is equally important, and this command of language is one of the primary characteristics that separates the work of professional writers from that of beginners. This week we’ll look at ways to make your prose stronger in each sentence and paragraph.

Week 8: Applying feedback


Writing groups and workshops (such as the one we’re conducting in this class) can be a great source of advice and motivation for your writing, but at times feedback can also be contradictory, confusing, or discouraging (even when it’s well-intentioned). During this week we’ll discuss how best to make use of the feedback you receive from others, and how to effectively edit your own work when you don’t have access to or prefer not to work with other writers.

Week 9: When is it finished?

One of the things many writers struggle with in the revision process is knowing when a piece is finished. In this week’s lecture we’ll discuss best practices for evaluating your own work and deciding when a piece is ready to submit for publication.

Week 10: The publication process

In this final week we’ll discuss next steps for your work once the revision process is finished. We’ll talk about the submission process for literary journals and magazines, as well as newspapers, and will cover the basics of submitting a manuscript to literary agents.

View Complete Syllabus

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Course Registration

$485.00

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Please Note

It is not uncommon for classes to fill up before the end of early registration, particularly in the last few days before the deadline. If you know for certain that you wish to take a particular class, we recommend registering early. If you'd like to be added to a waitlist for a sold-out class, please email our director of education, Sharla Yates, at [email protected].

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Creative Nonfiction’s online writing classes have helped more than 3,000 writers tell their stories better.

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Testimonials

I enjoyed reading other peoples work and getting feedback about my own work– the handouts/video links and class lessons were also very informative and relevantly paced to the give structural guidelines.

Catherine O’Neill