November is National Novel Writing Month: Register Now for Workshops with New York Writers Workshop by Yesenia Velasquez, Associate Manager, Adult ProgrammingOctober 19, 2021

Photos of Christina Chiu, Laura Geringer Bass, Charles Salzberg, Ravi Shankar, and Laura Zinn Fromm, plus the logo of the New York Writers Workshop

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and The New York Public Library is delighted to join forces with New York Writers Workshop (NYWW) to present a series of writing workshops. You can register now to join writers Christina Chiu, Laura Geringer Bass, Charles Salzberg, Ravi Shankar, and Laura Zinn Fromm to explore elements of novel-writing including the complexities of character, originality, narrative prose, plot and structure, dialogue, and memory. It’s time to write your Great American Novel!

New York Writers Workshop is an alliance of published authors and professional writers of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, poetry, plays and screenplays, who live and teach in New York City and a growing list of locales across the globe. NYWW is dedicated to offering professional guidance, resources and workshops that teach craft, foster creativity, and help writers achieve their goals.

Read more about these workshops below and follow the links to register.

The Telling Detail with Christina Chiu

"Show don’t tell" doesn’t mean describing everything. It means finding the right details to tell. Join Christina Chiu for a deep dive into the elements of fiction to understand how to find the right ones for your story.

 Please plan to attend all four sessions. Register for upcoming sessions here:

Building Your Story With Prompts with Laura Geringer Bass

In this workshop, participants will explore the art of discovering their own prompts and building short stories from them. Each week, the group will be offered several timed prompts as jumping off points to writing brief pieces in class. Volunteers will read their work aloud to share with their fellow writers. In addition, the class will read and discuss short excerpts from a diverse selection of story collections and then select and devise prompts from them. These stories will be examples of triumphs of craft and technique: point of view, setting, use of the five senses, dialogue, etc. and will help participants critique their own work. 

There will not be a critique of one another’s work in class. The goal is to inspire and encourage participants, with the help of open-ended prompts, to search memory, dream and their own pool of ideas and to discover, in that process, the freedom and focus to write their own original short fiction and flashes. 

 Please plan to attend all four sessions. Register for upcoming sessions here:

Novel Writing & The Personal Essay with Charles Salzberg

Sessions 1 & 2: How to Write a Novel 

How many times have you said to yourself, "You know, I could write a novel"? And how many times have you actually sat down and at least started to put words on paper? If you’re most people, the answer is, well, "no comment." In these first two sessions, you will be given all the tools you need to at least begin that Great American Novel you’ve been thinking about for so long. This class will discuss characters, plot, dialogue, structure, plotting, and how to write scenes. By the end you’ll at least know how to write a novel, even if you’re still an A-student in procrastination. 

Sessions 3 & 4: The Art of the Personal Essay 

In these next two sessions, attendees will discuss the art of the personal essay. Using what might seem to be an insignificant or ordinary event and then making it universal in scope, the best personal essays illuminate and transcend the subject so that the reader—and often the writer—learns something important about him or herself. Best described as a combination of a letter and a short story, the personal essay can tackle weighty subjects like birth, death, and marriage, or lighter moments like buying a new car or playing touch football in the park.  By using written examples, participants will learn how to come up with ideas for essays, and how to construct them.

 Please plan to attend all four sessions. Register for upcoming sessions here:

On Hybrid Narratives with Ravi Shankar

Sometimes we are limited by what we imagine a story to be, but in this class participants will expand their notion of storytelling by looking at different approaches and angles, such as the colorful mania of gonzo journalism or the blurring of boundaries in autofiction. Using the materials of their lives and memories are not enough; writers need to also analyze the elevator of dramatic tension, the keen ear for dialogue, how to use point-of-view like a cinematographer uses a camera, and most importantly how to write well-crafted sentences that propel us forward. Open to writers of all abilities. 

 Please plan to attend all four sessions. Register for upcoming sessions here:

How to Write a Great Story: Explorations in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction with Laura Zinn Fromm

Get ready for an intensive writing experience. Before each class, participants will receive a link to a reading and a series of writing prompts. In class, writers will respond to the prompts, with breaks to read what they’ve written out loud and receive feedback on their work. Attendees will leave each session fired up, with new work in hand.

Please plan to attend all four sessions. Register for upcoming sessions here:

About the Instructors

Christina Chiu is an author, speaker, and literary host. Her novel Beauty won the James Alan McPherson Award and was a Kirkus Best of 2020 Pick of the Year. Her first book, Troublemaker and Other Saints was a nominee for a BOMC Stephen Crane First Fiction Award, and winner of the Asian American Literary Award. Chiu has published in Tin House, The New Guard, Washington Square, The MacGuffin, Charlie Chan is Dead 2, Not the Only One, Washington Square, and has won literary prizes from Playboy, New Stone Circle, El Dorado Writers’ Guild, World Wide Writers. Chiu hosts the virtual "Let’s Talk Books" author series and curates and co-hosts the Pen Parentis Literary Salon in NYC. She is a founding member of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a member of the New York Writers Workshop. Christina is also a shoe designer. She received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

Laura Geringer Bass has taught writing workshops at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan, Stonybrook University in Southampton, the East Harlem School in NYC  and for Girls Write Now in NYC , Foster Pride, NYC and in cooperation with First Book and An Open Book Foundation, Washington D.C. among other organizations and schools nationwide. She is the author of The Girl with More Than One Heart (Abrams, 2018) and over twenty books for young people. For many years, she was the publisher of an award-winning literary imprint, Laura Geringer Books at HarperCollins. She is a member of New York Writers Workshop and serves on the board of First Book, a non-profit social enterprise that has distributed over 200 million books to children in need. You may find more information about her on her website. 

Charles Salzberg is a former magazine journalist and nonfiction book writer. His novel Swann's Last Song was nominated for a Shamus Award, as was Second Story Man, winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award. He's the author of Swann Dives In, Swann's Lake of Despair, Swann's Down, and Swann's Way Out, as well as Devil in the Hole, named by Suspense Magazine as one of the best crime novels of 2013. He has written several novellas, included in the collections, Triple Shot, Three Strikes, and Third Degree. He is a Founding Member of New York Writers Workshop, and on the board of MWA-NY and PrisonWrites. 

Dr. Ravi Shankar is a Pushcart prize-winning poet, translator and professor who has published 15 books, including the Muse India award-winning translations Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess and The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond called "a beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, fellowships from the Rhode Island and Connecticut Council on the Arts, founded one of the oldest electronic journals of the arts Drunken Boat, and recently finished his PhD from the University of Sydney. His memoir Correctional is forthcoming in 2021 with University of Wisconsin Press.

Laura Zinn Fromm is a journalist, editor, writing coach and the author of Sweet Survival: Tales of Cooking & Coping, published by Greenpoint Press.  She holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She is a member of New York Writers Workshop and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction workshops in New York City. She has also taught at Columbia and Montclair State. A former reporter and editor at Business Week magazine, she is a winner of the Clarion Award and the Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award for Labor Reporting. Her work has appeared in The  New York Times, The Huffington Post, Bloomberg Business Week and elsewhere. She has appeared on CBS, CNBC, and various cable channels, and lives in New York City.

Looking for more writing opportunities? Drop by an in-person workshop with Nana Ekua-Brew Hammond at Edenwald Library and Woodstock Library. 


Everyone Has a Story with Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

Do you have a story inside of you that's been burning to come out, but you just have no idea where or how to begin? Are you working on a book but feel stuck and in desperate need of fresh eyes? Over four weeks, you'll get the tools you need to (re)develop your narrative and your characters, and get you on your way to share your story with the readers who need it. In-session exercises will offer participants the opportunity to immediately apply learnings for on-the-spot feedback. Author Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond will guide participants through the art of writing over four sessions. 

View all posts by Yesenia Velasquez

Comments

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Writer Workshop

Submitted by Moïse-Léna Mari... (not verified) on October 25, 2021 - 9:15am

I am intending to attend all the sessions.

Great! You can click through

Submitted by Carrie McBride on October 25, 2021 - 10:12am

Great! You can click through to each session to register.

How to write a novel

Submitted by Linda Selman (not verified) on October 26, 2021 - 9:40am

I want to go to Charles Salzberg’s sessions

Will there be recordings of

Submitted by Guest (not verified) on October 25, 2021 - 11:46am

Will there be recordings of some of these sessions if I’m unavailable to make them when they’re being hosted?