The Craft of Revision — A Writers' Workshop

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Session 1 — Welcome & What Revision Is Not

Focus: The psychology of revision; why writers avoid it; what it actually is versus what we fear it is.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Revision is re-seeing, not repair. The word means, literally, to look again. It is not fixing typos, not polishing sentences, not correcting grammar — those come last. It is the act of looking at what you wrote with the eyes of someone who did not write it, and then changing what the piece actually needs. This is the work published writers spend most of their time doing.
2. Drafting and revising are two different jobs — do not try to do both at once. When you draft, you are discovering what you want to say and finding language for it simultaneously, and those two tasks fight each other. When you revise, the discovery is done; you can give your whole attention to whether the language does what you intend. Separating the two modes is the first practical move of the course.
3. First drafts are supposed to be bad, and “bad” only means unfinished. The myth of the writer who gets it right the first time paralyzes more people than any other belief about writing. A messy first draft is not evidence of weak talent; it is evidence that you did the hard, generative work. Lamott’s permission to write a “shitty first draft” is the precondition for writing a good final one.
4. Editors read for the gap between intention and execution. A professional reading the manuscript for the first time is not asking “is this good?” but “what is this trying to do, and where does the page fall short of it?” Learning to read your own work this way — diagnosing the distance between aim and result — is the central skill of revision.
5. The fear of revision is the fear of looking honestly at your own pages. Most avoidance of revision is emotional, not technical. Naming that fear out loud, in a room of people doing the same thing, is what makes the rest of the term possible.

Reading

• Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts,” from Bird by Bird — free PDF at University of Kentucky; also available through the Philadelphia Free Library

Critical Reception

• Shitty First Drafts (annotated teaching edition) — Humanities LibreTexts/03:_Identity/3.04:_Anne_Lamott’s_Shitty_First_Drafts) — Lamott’s case that permission to write badly is the precondition for writing well, set in a teaching apparatus.
• Revision Advice from the Judges’ Table — Brevity — editors describe what they actually look for, and why most fixes begin by returning to the original ambition.
• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — one of the great American editors on what he does when a manuscript first crosses his desk.

In-Class Practice

Each writer reads aloud — to themselves, quietly — the first paragraph of what they brought. They underline one sentence they would change if they could change only one. They share only the sentence and why. No formal workshop tonight: instead, each writer says their name, what they brought, and one thing they find genuinely difficult about revision.

Discussion Questions

1. Lamott insists that all good writers write terrible first drafts. Does that match your own experience, or have you believed the opposite?
2. What is the difference, in your own words, between fixing a draft and re-seeing it?
3. Why do you think revision is so rarely taught, even though working writers spend most of their time doing it?
4. What do you find genuinely difficult or frightening about revising your own work?
5. When you read your opening paragraph just now, what made you want to change that one sentence?
6. What would it change for you to treat “done” as “begun”?

Homework

Before Session 2, read your entire draft aloud — alone, at home — and mark every place where you stumble, rush, or feel embarrassed. Do not fix anything yet. Just mark.

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Session 2 — Reading Your Own Work Aloud

Focus: The ear as editorial instrument. Why hearing your prose exposes what the eye forgives.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The ear catches what the eye forgives. Reading aloud is the single fastest diagnostic in revision. Your eye reads what you meant to write; your mouth and ear can only deal with what is actually on the page. The disagreement between them is exactly where your revision should begin.
2. Reading aloud exposes three specific defects: rhythm breaks, accidental repetition, and dead weight. A sentence that the eye glides over will trip the tongue; a word repeated three times in a paragraph that looked fine will clang when spoken. Mark every stumble — each one is a location, not a vague feeling, and locations can be revised.
3. There is always a gap between what you meant to write and what you wrote. The draft in your head is fluent and complete; the draft on the page is not yet. Hearing the sentences is the most reliable way to measure that gap so you can close it.
4. Read slowly, pen in hand — do not perform. The goal is diagnosis, not a dramatic recital. Going slowly forces you to register each word individually, which is the only way to notice the one that is wrong.
5. Recording and playback turn you into your own first reader. Listening back to your own voice creates the distance an outside reader has and you normally lack — you hear the prose as something received rather than something remembered.

Reading

• William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style — the chapters on clarity and concision, free at Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Speak Your Writing to Life — Brevity — a working writer’s account of using the spoken voice to uncover meaning, emotion, and the details that matter.
• The Latest Draft — Brevity — why reading the pages aloud, again and again, is central to catching the small stuff and finding new ideas.
• Why You Should Read Your Work Out Loud — Jane Friedman — a practical breakdown of what the spoken read reveals and how to build it into your process.

In-Class Practice

Each writer reads two paragraphs of their draft aloud to the room. After each reading, the group offers one word — not a critique, just a word — that captures their experience as a listener. The writer notes the words. We then turn to the first workshop of the term: one writer’s pages (1–3 pages, distributed before session) are read and discussed by the group, with the writer listening silently and responding at the end.

Discussion Questions

1. What did you hear in your own prose, reading it aloud, that you had never noticed silently?
2. Strunk and White prize plainness and clarity. Where in your draft does the language get in the way of the meaning?
3. When the group gave you a single word as a listener, did it match what you intended the passage to do?
4. Where in the workshopped piece did the prose sound most alive when read aloud? Where did it sag?
5. What is the difference between prose that reads well silently and prose that sounds good?
6. What practical habit could you build to read your work aloud as part of every revision?

Homework

Record yourself reading your draft aloud (phone voice memo is fine). Play it back. Mark every moment of awkwardness, hesitation, or loss of energy. Bring the marked-up pages to Session 3.

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Session 3 — Cutting: The Discipline of Subtraction

Focus: Why less is almost always more; how to identify what the piece does not need.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Vigorous writing is concise — make every word tell. Strunk’s most famous rule is not a demand that all sentences be short, but that no word be idle. Before keeping a word, ask what it earns. The single most reliable improvement most drafts can undergo is the removal of what is not working.
2. Use the 10% rule as a forcing function. Take a page and cut exactly one word in ten. The constraint matters: an arbitrary target makes you examine words you would otherwise defend out of habit, and the resulting pace change is almost always an improvement. Count before and after so the cut is real, not imagined.
3. Cut in a known order: adverbs, throat-clearing, redundant exposition, over-explanation. Adverbs that intensify rather than modify (just, very, really, completely) go first. Then the warm-up sentences before the real beginning, then the information the reader already has, then the lines that explain what the scene already showed.
4. Distinguish cutting what you love from cutting what the piece doesn’t need. “Killing your darlings” does not mean destroying your best writing; it means refusing to keep a brilliant sentence that the piece does not require. Attachment to a line is not a reason to keep it — only its work in the whole is.
5. Subtraction is a positive act. When you cut a passage and feel the piece suddenly breathe, the freedom you feel is not the loss of words — it is the gain of the piece. Trust that sensation; it is the most reliable signal in revision.

Reading

• William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, “Omit Needless Words” (Rule 13/17) — free at Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Come On In, the Writing’s Fine — Brevity — a working essayist narrates her own cuts in real time, including the adverbs she let creep in and then struck.
• Revising with Lenses — Brevity — the poet Thomas Lux’s method of making one focused pass per problem, including a pass devoted only to cutting.
• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — a master editor on knowing what to remove and how to persuade a writer to let it go.

In-Class Practice

Each writer takes one page of their draft and cuts 10% — exactly. Count the words before and after. Read the reduced version aloud. Note what happened. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to where the draft might be leaner — asking of each paragraph not what is missing, but what could go.

Discussion Questions

1. When you cut your page by 10%, what surprised you about which words turned out to be dispensable?
2. Strunk says “make every word tell.” Is there a place in your draft where you are keeping words for comfort rather than for work?
3. What is the difference, in practice, between cutting what you love and cutting what the piece doesn’t need?
4. Where in the workshopped piece did subtraction make the writing stronger? Was anything lost?
5. Are there kinds of writing where the 10% rule would do harm? Where might compression go too far?
6. What is the hardest darling you have ever had to kill — and were you right to?

Homework

Apply the 10% rule to the rest of your draft. Do not cut randomly — cut strategically. What does every remaining word earn?

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Session 4 — The Opening Sentence

Focus: Why the first sentence carries disproportionate weight; what strong openings do technically.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The first sentence has three jobs: establish voice, create a question, and earn the second sentence. It is the only sentence a reader is guaranteed to read. A strong opening sets the register of the narrator, opens a gap the reader needs closed, and generates enough momentum that stopping feels unnatural.
2. Your real first sentence is often on page three. Most drafts begin with throat-clearing — the writer warming up before the piece truly starts. In revision, look for the sentence where the energy actually ignites and ask whether everything before it can be cut. Frequently it can.
3. The opening makes a promise, and the piece must keep it. A first line establishes what kind of experience the reader is in for — its tone, its stakes, its subject. When the body of the piece breaks that promise, the reader feels betrayed even if they can’t say why; aligning opening and delivery is a revision task.
4. In medias res beats chronology. Beginning in the middle of something already in motion — rather than at the orderly start — is one of the oldest and most effective structural choices. Ask where the actual pressure in your piece begins, and consider opening there.
5. Generate alternatives before you commit. The first opening you wrote is rarely the best one available; it is only the first one you found. Drafting several genuinely different openings — not better, just different — is how you discover which door into the piece is the right one.

Reading

• A comparison set of published first lines — Kafka, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joan Didion, James Baldwin — available through the Philadelphia Free Library, with close reading of what each does technically

Critical Reception

• The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion — The Paris Review — Didion on grammar, the first sentence, and how an opening sets a piece’s whole arrangement.
• Ghost: The Flash Ending That Appears from Nowhere — Brevity — though framed around endings, a sharp account of how beginnings plant what later pays off.
• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (excerpt) — Silver Birch Press — the “fictional dream” and why a false or clumsy opening breaks it before it begins.

In-Class Practice

Each writer reads their current opening sentence. The group names the question it creates (or doesn’t). Each writer drafts two alternative opening sentences — not better, just different — and reads them alongside the original. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to the opening and what it sets up.

Discussion Questions

1. Of the published first lines we read, which made you most need to keep reading — and what technical move created that need?
2. Read your own opening aloud: what question, if any, does it create in a reader’s mind?
3. Could your piece begin later than it currently does? What would you lose by cutting to page three?
4. What promise does your opening make, and does the rest of your draft keep it?
5. In the workshopped piece, where did the true beginning seem to be?
6. When does in medias res serve a piece, and when does a reader need orientation first?

Homework

Write three versions of your opening paragraph: one that starts earlier, one that starts later, one that starts in a completely different place. Bring all three next week.

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Session 5 — The Ending

Focus: The difference between stopping and ending; what a satisfying close actually does.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Stopping is not ending. A piece can run out of words without arriving anywhere. An ending is a destination the whole piece has been moving toward, even when the reader didn’t know it; in revision, ask whether your last paragraph lands the piece or merely halts it.
2. Endings are harder than openings because you must earn them. An opening only has to create a question; an ending has to answer it — or refuse to, deliberately. You cannot bolt on resonance at the close; it must be paid for by everything that came before.
3. Know your three basic options: the circular close, the open ending, and the ironic turn. The circular ending returns to an image or phrase from the start, now changed by all that intervened. The open ending withholds resolution on purpose. The ironic turn reverses the reader’s expectation. Each makes a different promise to the reader.
4. The last line travels home with the reader. It is the sentence they carry out the door. Revise it with more care than any other — test whether it resonates rather than merely concludes, whether it opens outward rather than clicking shut too neatly.
5. The ending rarely gets fixed by tinkering with the ending. If the close isn’t working, the problem is usually upstream: a stake never raised, a thread never planted. Look backward from the ending to find what it needed and never received.

Reading

• Instructor-selected short-story endings (Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, or similar) available through the Philadelphia Free Library — two or three endings that work and one that doesn’t, read side by side

Critical Reception

• Ghost: The Flash Ending That Appears from Nowhere — Brevity — how the strongest endings arrive from an unexpected angle yet feel inevitable in hindsight.
• Revision Advice from the Judges’ Table — Brevity — the working principle that “the ending probably isn’t going to get fixed by only tinkering with the ending.”
• The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion — The Paris Review — Didion on how she knew where a piece had to stop, and why the last line is structural, not decorative.

In-Class Practice

Each writer writes the last line of a piece they have not written yet — a piece that doesn’t exist. Just the last line. Share aloud. Discuss what each line implies about the piece it would close. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to how the piece is currently ending and what a stronger close might require.

Discussion Questions

1. Of the endings we read, which felt earned and which felt merely arrived at? What made the difference?
2. Does your current draft stop, or does it end? How can you tell?
3. Which of the three ending types — circular, open, ironic — best suits the piece you are working on, and why?
4. Read your last line aloud. What does the reader carry out the door with it?
5. If your ending isn’t working, what upstream element might it actually be missing?
6. Can an ending be too neat? When does resolution become a disservice to the reader?

Homework

Write two alternative endings for your draft. One should close down; one should open out. Bring both.

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Session 6 — Scene vs. Summary

Focus: When to dramatize and when to compress; how writers manage time on the page.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Learn the difference cold: scene is dramatized, real-time, and sensory; summary is compressed, reported, and retrospective. Scene puts the reader inside the moment as it unfolds; summary tells them that something happened. Both are necessary. Confusing them — or defaulting to one — is among the most common structural problems in a draft.
2. The fictional dream depends on scene. Gardner’s idea is that good narrative produces a continuous, vivid dream in the reader’s mind; clumsy summary or intrusion breaks the dream. When you want the reader fully present, dramatize; reserve summary for the connective tissue between the moments that matter.
3. Manage the rhythm of alternation. Summary earns a scene by building toward a moment worth slowing down for; scene earns summary by giving the reader a vivid experience that compression can then carry forward. A draft that is all scene exhausts; one that is all summary keeps the reader at arm’s length.
4. Hunt for the scenes you are summarizing that you should be writing. The most frequent revision discovery is a sentence like “we argued for years” sitting where a single dramatized argument should be. Find the emotional peaks you have reported from a distance and ask which one deserves to be witnessed.
5. Watch the “twenty-year compression” problem in memoir. Life is long; a piece is short. The temptation to summarize decades flattens the very moments that carry meaning. Decide deliberately what to compress and what to dramatize, rather than letting the calendar decide for you.

Reading

• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, on the “fictional dream” and what breaks it — excerpt free at Silver Birch Press; supplemented by a memoir passage contrasting scene with summary

Critical Reception

• Mary Poppins and the Art of Sweetening with Scene — Brevity — how a brief opening scene buys the reader’s patience for the reflection that follows.
• No Ideas but in (Beautiful) Things — Brevity — on “show, don’t tell” versus the concrete object, and when summary can still carry symbolic weight.
• John Gardner’s craft notes — Katey Schultz — collected passages on the fictional dream and the writer’s control of the reader’s experience.

In-Class Practice

Each writer locates one passage in their draft that is summary when it should be scene. In fifteen minutes, they begin converting it. Share the original and the new version. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to the scene/summary ratio.

Discussion Questions

1. In the mentor passages, where did the writer choose scene over summary — and what did dramatization buy them?
2. Find a place in your draft where you summarized a moment the reader deserved to witness. Why did you compress it?
3. Is there a scene in your draft that could be summarized without loss? What is it doing that earns its space?
4. In the workshopped piece, did the rhythm of scene and summary feel intentional or accidental?
5. What does the “fictional dream” feel like as a reader — and what kinds of writing tend to break it for you?
6. In memoir, how do you decide which years to compress into a sentence and which moments to slow down into scene?

Homework

Identify every major event in your draft. Mark each S (scene) or Su (summary). Look at the pattern. Is it intentional? Revise one Su to S.

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Session 7 — A Working Writer's Revision: One Story, Its Drafts

A word before we begin. I share a paragraph of my own work this week not because it is exemplary — there are better stories on every shelf — but because I am the only working writer in this room I have permission to dissect publicly. The point is the process, not the product. This is the single session in our sixteen weeks in which I will put a piece of my own writing on the table, and I want to be precise about why. It is not so that you will admire it. It is not so that my voice should sit above the writers we read all term — the Lamotts and the Whites and the Didions, who have earned their places and whom you should keep arguing with long after this course ends. It is, simply, that I cannot in good conscience walk you through the rough and final drafts of a stranger’s private papers, and I would never ask one of you to expose your own early drafts before you are ready. So I volunteer mine. I am the safest specimen in the room — and I am asking you to treat the piece as a text, not a tribute. Push back on it. Tell me where it still does not work. That is the most useful thing you could possibly do for me, and the truest thing this session can teach you about revision.

Why Use My Own Work This Week?

The argument goes something like this. Anne Lamott describes her process in Bird by Bird. Stephen King describes his in On Writing. Annie Dillard describes hers in The Writing Life. We teach those books in MFA programs and undergraduate workshops everywhere — and they are wonderful — but the writer is never in the room. The student reads a finished essay about revision and that is the end of it. They do not see the actual cuts. They do not hear the writer change their mind about a sentence in real time, hesitate over a word, decide against it, and explain why. That is the gap this session fills. It is not because my story is better than the canon — it is not, and there are stories on every shelf I would rather you read. It is because I am the only working writer in this room I have permission to put up in draft form, to mark up, to argue with, to cut from in real time. So please hold the distinction firmly: the session is not “study Mr. Mulhern’s story.” The session is “watch a working writer revise his own work, and then apply what you see to your own.”

Where the Story Came From

People imagine a story arrives whole. It does not. The one we will look at this week began as nothing more than a single overheard line — a woman in a Dorchester kitchen saying, of someone who had wronged her badly, “I forgave her, but I never let her back in.” I wrote that sentence in a notebook and did nothing with it for the better part of ten years. It sat there with a hundred other orphaned lines: a face I saw on a bus, the smell of my grandmother’s coat, a feeling I had at a funeral and could not name. Most of those lines die in the notebook. A few, for reasons I still cannot fully explain, refuse to.

What I want you to understand is the size of the gap between that origin and the finished story. The overheard line was true; almost nothing else in the story is. I invented the woman, her sister, the house, the decades of grievance between them. The autobiographical seed — the grief, the particular Irish-Catholic refusal to either forgive or forget — is real, and it is the only thing I kept. Everything around it I made up in service of that one true feeling. That is the work: you keep the emotional truth and you invent the facts that will carry it.

The story you read this week did not start as a story. None of mine do. They start as small things — a phrase, a face, a feeling I could not name — and only become stories after years of cutting and waiting.

Focus: The discipline of cutting and re-seeing one’s own work — watching, in real time, how a working contemporary writer takes a paragraph apart and puts it back together.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Revision is the real writing. Not the cleanup after the work, but the work itself. The first draft is raw material; the writing is what you do to it next. Watching a working writer cut and re-see a single paragraph in real time is meant to make that abstract claim concrete.
2. We protect the sentences that cost us the most — and that instinct is usually wrong. The fear of cutting is strongest exactly where we worked hardest. But effort is not the same as effect; a sentence that was difficult to write can still be the one the piece doesn’t need. Naming that instinct is the first step to overriding it.
3. Read aloud to find the cuts. The same diagnostic from Session 2 applies to your own finished-seeming work: the ear catches the dead modifier, the buried verb, the line that sounded fine silently. I will demonstrate this live on my own rough and final paragraphs.
4. Three reliable moves: delete the opening, kill the modifiers, surface the verb. Often the real first sentence is the second paragraph; often the adjectives and adverbs are doing the work a stronger noun or verb should do. I will show each of these moves on my own page and name why I could finally bear to make them.
5. Ask of every paragraph: is this earning its place? Not “is this good?” but “does the piece need it?” That single question, applied honestly and repeatedly, is the whole engine of revision.

Reading

• Anne Lamott, “Shitty First Drafts,” from Bird by Bird — free PDF at University of Kentucky. We return to Lamott deliberately: she gave us, in Session 1, permission to write badly on the way to writing well. This week we read her again as a craft document, not a pep talk — watching what “writing well” actually costs at the level of the paragraph.

Mr. Mulhern’s Story: You do not need to read anything of mine in advance, and there is nothing to buy. The piece we will look at comes from Mia Bambina and Other Dark Stories (Silver Current Press, 2026) — my most recent collection and, I think, my strongest published book of short fiction to date. Like much of my work, its stories are set in the working-class Irish Catholic Boston of my childhood and turn on family, memory, and grief. In class only, I will distribute two versions of the same opening paragraph from one of those stories. One version is an early draft. One is what finally went to print. Nothing else. We will look at two paragraphs side by side and ask the only question that matters: what changed, and did the change earn its place? Curious students are welcome to browse my catalog at https://authorjamesmulhern.com, but please understand that the website is not an assignment — it is there for the curious, not the dutiful.

Critical Reception

• Shitty First Drafts (annotated teaching edition) — Humanities LibreTexts/03:_Identity/3.04:_Anne_Lamott’s_Shitty_First_Drafts) — Lamott read as craft, with the apparatus a workshop can argue against.
• Revising with Lenses — Brevity — Thomas Lux’s one-problem-per-pass method, a model for the live, sequential cutting I will demonstrate.
• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — an editor watching a writer revise, from the other side of the desk.

In-Class Practice

Each writer pulls out a page of their own current draft. I will read my own paragraph aloud — first in its rough version, then in the final version — narrating the cuts in real time, telling you what I removed and why I could finally bear to remove it. Then you take fifteen minutes with a red pen and cut fifteen percent of your own page. Not the whole draft. One page. Fifteen percent, exactly. Count the words before and after. We then workshop one writer’s pages, with the group looking specifically for opportunities to cut — not for what is missing, but for what could go. We will ask of each paragraph what I asked of mine: is this earning its place?

Discussion Questions

1. Watching the rough and final versions of my paragraph side by side, which single cut surprised you most — and why?
2. Which sentence in your own page did you most resist cutting? What was the resistance protecting?
3. Lamott separates the down draft from the up draft. Where are you, honestly, in that sequence with your current piece?
4. Of the three moves — delete the opening, kill the modifiers, surface the verb — which most applies to your page right now?
5. In the workshopped piece, what could go that the writer might be protecting?
6. What does it change for you to hear that even a published story began as one overheard line and a decade of waiting?

Homework

Cut twenty percent from any piece you are working on. Bring the before and the after to next session — both versions, so we can see the cut, not just the result.

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Session 8 — Concrete Detail

Focus: Abstraction as the enemy of vivid prose; the power of specific, sensory language.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The abstract repels readers; the specific draws them in. “She was nervous” tells the reader a conclusion; “she folded and unfolded the same corner of the menu four times” lets them reach it themselves. In revision, the move is to replace stated feeling with the observable detail that produces it.
2. Use the five senses as a revision checklist — not a formula. Run a passage against sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch and ask which senses you have neglected. Most drafts over-rely on the visual; a single well-chosen smell or texture can ground a scene the eye alone cannot.
3. The telling detail does the work of ten general ones. One precise, specific thing — the Brut aftershave, the silver scissors — can stand for an entire person or mood. Concrete detail is not decoration; chosen well, the object carries the meaning, so the writer doesn’t have to state it.
4. Learn to locate your own abstraction. Certain words flag it: something, somehow, very, really, felt, seemed. When you catch them in your draft, you have usually found a place where you summarized a feeling instead of rendering it. Underline them and convert.
5. “No ideas but in things.” Williams’s dictum is a revision instruction: when an abstract idea won’t land, find the concrete object that embodies it and put that on the page instead. The thing carries the idea further than the idea can carry itself.

Reading

• Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (excerpt), available through the Philadelphia Free Library — or a selected contemporary essay in which concrete detail carries the entire weight of meaning

Critical Reception

• No Ideas but in (Beautiful) Things — Brevity — a close look at “show, don’t tell” versus the concrete object, and how a thing moves toward symbol.
• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (excerpt) — Silver Birch Press — the vivid, continuous detail that sustains the fictional dream and the vagueness that shatters it.
• William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style — Project Gutenberg — “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.”

In-Class Practice

Each writer finds one abstract sentence in their draft and rewrites it using only concrete, sensory language. Share both versions. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to the balance between abstract and concrete.

Discussion Questions

1. In the mentor passage, find the single most concrete detail. What does it carry that a general statement could not?
2. When you converted your own abstract sentence, what did you discover you actually meant?
3. Which of the five senses do you most neglect in your writing? What would change if you used it?
4. Is there such a thing as too much concrete detail? When does specificity become clutter?
5. In the workshopped piece, where did a telling detail do real work — and where did abstraction stand in for it?
6. What is one object from your own material that could stand for far more than itself?

Homework

Go through your entire draft and underline every abstraction. Choose the five most important and rewrite each concretely. Bring the new pages.

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Session 9 — Voice

Focus: What voice is and what it isn’t; how to find the consistent register of your prose.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Voice, style, and tone are three different things. Voice is the consistent impression of a particular consciousness on the page; style is the set of technical habits that produce it; tone is the narrator’s attitude toward the material at a given moment. Confusing them muddies revision — you fix voice differently than you fix tone.
2. Register is the social pitch of the language, and unintended shifts read as error. A narrator who is plainspoken for three pages and then suddenly turns ornate has broken something the reader feels before they can name it. In revision, hunt for the sentence that belongs to a different speaker and decide whether the shift is purposeful.
3. Every “I” on the page is a persona — even in autobiography. The narrator is always a crafted version of the writer, never the whole person. Recognizing this frees you to make deliberate choices about what the speaker knows, reveals, and withholds, rather than defaulting to “just being yourself.”
4. Voice emerges when self-consciousness drops. Your truest voice tends to surface where you stopped performing and simply spoke. In revision, find the passages that sound unmistakably like you, and use them as the tuning fork for the passages that don’t.
5. Editors detect a voice inconsistency before they can explain it. The felt sense of “something’s off here” usually means the register slipped. Trust that instinct as a reader of your own draft, then locate the specific sentence that caused it.

Reading

• Joan Didion, the opening of Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The Year of Magical Thinking, available through the Philadelphia Free Library — examined for what stays technically consistent across every sentence she writes

Critical Reception

• The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion — The Paris Review — Didion on how grammar and arrangement create the voice readers recognize as unmistakably hers.
• Chasing Our Elusive Voice — Brevity — the argument that voice surfaces when tension and self-consciousness fall away, and that immersion in subject builds authority.
• Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction — Brevity — the two narrating voices most writers braid together, and how persona shapes meaning.

In-Class Practice

Each writer reads one page of their draft aloud. The group identifies two moments where the voice feels entirely consistent and one moment where it wavers. Writers annotate. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to voice consistency and register.

Discussion Questions

1. What, technically, makes Didion’s voice recognizable from sentence to sentence?
2. When the group named where your voice wavered, did the shift turn out to be intentional or accidental?
3. How would you describe your own narrator’s persona — and how is that speaker different from you in daily life?
4. Where does your draft sound most like you? What is happening in those passages that isn’t happening elsewhere?
5. In the workshopped piece, where did the register shift, and did it serve the writing?
6. Can a piece have more than one voice on purpose? When does that enrich the work, and when does it fracture it?

Homework

Read your draft and mark every sentence that sounds like a different person than the one who wrote the sentence before it. Ask: why? Then decide: intentional or accidental?

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Session 10 — Dialogue

Focus: How to write conversation that sounds like people; the function of dialogue as action.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Dialogue must do more than convey information. If a line of speech only delivers facts the reader needs, it is exposition wearing quotation marks. Good dialogue simultaneously reveals character, advances the situation, and creates pressure — it is action, not transcription.
2. “Said” is invisible; most alternatives are distracting. Readers’ eyes pass over said and asked without registering them, which is exactly what a tag should do. He expostulated, she hissed and their cousins pull attention to the writer instead of the scene. Cut adverbs glued to tags, too — let the line itself carry the emotion.
3. Subtext is where dialogue lives. People rarely say what they mean. The most charged exchanges run on what the characters are not saying; in revision, look for speeches that state feelings outright and bury them, so the silence does the work.
4. Real speech is broken — use that. People interrupt, trail off, repeat themselves, and leave sentences unfinished. A little of this controlled disorder makes dialogue sound human; perfectly complete, grammatical sentences sound like writing.
5. Read dialogue aloud, in character — it is the fastest diagnostic. If a line is hard to say or sounds like prose, it will sound false to the reader. Your own mouth is the most reliable test of whether speech rings true.

Reading

• A passage of exemplary dialogue — Elmore Leonard, Raymond Carver, or Junot Díaz — available through the Philadelphia Free Library, read against a passage of over-written, over-explained dialogue for contrast

Critical Reception

• Searching Brevity Essays by Craft Element: Dialogue — Brevity — a curated index of free craft essays on rendering character through speech.
• The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion — The Paris Review — on writing speech that carries weight without explaining itself.
• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (excerpt) — Silver Birch Press — dialogue as part of the continuous fictional dream, and what breaks it.

In-Class Practice

Each writer rewrites a line of dialogue from their draft — or writes a new exchange — using only “said” (or no tag) and no adverbs attached to the tag. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to how dialogue is functioning and how it might breathe more freely.

Discussion Questions

1. In the mentor passage, what is each line of dialogue doing besides conveying information?
2. Read your own dialogue aloud, in character. Where did it sound like speech, and where like writing?
3. Where in your draft are characters saying exactly what they mean? Could subtext do more?
4. What do dialogue tags fancier than “said” cost a passage? Is there ever a case for them?
5. In the workshopped piece, where did the dialogue breathe, and where did it feel airless?
6. How much broken, interrupted speech is too much before it tips into gimmick?

Homework

Read every line of dialogue in your draft aloud, in character. Mark anything that sounds like writing rather than speech. Revise.

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Session 11 — Sentence Rhythm

Focus: How the length and structure of sentences controls pacing, emphasis, and emotional effect.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Short, short, long is the basic unit of rhythmic variation. Two brief sentences followed by a long one — or the reverse — creates a pulse readers feel without noticing. Sentence rhythm is to prose what meter is to poetry; in revision, you can shape pace and emphasis purely by varying length.
2. A long sentence can earn speed; a short sentence earns weight. A well-built long sentence accumulates momentum and carries the reader forward in a rush; a short sentence after it lands like a stop. Placement is everything — the short sentence gains its force from the long one before it.
3. The period is a percussion instrument. Where you end a sentence determines where the reader breathes and where emphasis falls. Splitting one long sentence into two, or fusing two into one, changes the music even when the words barely change.
4. Monotony kills emphasis. If every sentence is the same length, no sentence stands out — the prose flatlines. Mapping your sentence lengths exposes this instantly; the cure is deliberate variation.
5. The fragment is illegal in school and essential in prose. A deliberate fragment can deliver a punch no complete sentence can. Used sparingly and on purpose, it is one of the most useful tools of rhythm; used carelessly, it reads as a mistake.

Reading

• Cormac McCarthy, a paragraph from The Road, through the Philadelphia Free Library; and Virginia Woolf, a paragraph from Mrs Dalloway — free at Project Gutenberg — two opposite rhythmic strategies, both working perfectly

Critical Reception

• William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style — Project Gutenberg — “Avoid a succession of loose sentences,” and the case for varied sentence construction.
• The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion — The Paris Review — Didion on grammar as rhythm, and how the arrangement of words controls the reader’s breathing.
• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (excerpt) — Silver Birch Press — on prose rhythm and the sentence-level texture of the fictional dream.

In-Class Practice

Each writer maps one paragraph of their draft: write the word count of each sentence in sequence (e.g., 12-14-11-13-12). Look at the pattern. Revise to break it. We then workshop one writer’s pages with specific attention to sentence-level rhythm and where the prose feels monotonous or rushed.

Discussion Questions

1. McCarthy and Woolf use opposite rhythmic strategies. Which felt more natural to you as a reader, and why?
2. When you mapped your own paragraph’s sentence lengths, what pattern emerged — and was it intentional?
3. Where in your draft would a deliberate fragment do work a full sentence cannot?
4. How does a writer decide where to place the period for maximum effect?
5. In the workshopped piece, where did the rhythm carry you, and where did it stall?
6. Can you think of a passage — yours or a writer’s you admire — where rhythm alone created emotion?

Homework

Take one page of your draft and deliberately vary the sentence lengths — including at least one sentence of three words or fewer and one sentence of more than thirty words.

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Session 12 — Showing the Stakes

Focus: What the narrator stands to lose — and why every paragraph must make that loss feel possible.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Stakes are emotional, relational, and psychological — not plot stakes. What matters is not what blows up but what the narrator stands to lose inside: a relationship, an illusion, a sense of self. A quiet piece can have enormous stakes; a loud one can have none. Revision means making the internal loss feel possible on the page.
2. Every piece runs on one question: what does this person want, and what is in the way? This is the engine of fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction alike. If you cannot answer it for your own draft, the reader cannot feel the stakes — because there are none yet.
3. The throughline is the single question the piece keeps trying to answer. It is the deep subject beneath the surface subject, distinct from plot. Naming your throughline gives you a test for every paragraph: does this serve the question the piece is really asking, or has it wandered?
4. Readers stop reading when the stakes go invisible. The most common reason a draft loses a reader is not a bad sentence but a stretch where nothing seems to be at risk. In revision, find the pages where the loss disappears and restore the pressure.
5. Make the loss visible at the sentence level. Stakes are not announced; they are felt through detail, through what the narrator notices and fears. The revision move is to seed each paragraph with some reminder — small, concrete — of what could be lost.

Reading

• James Baldwin, a passage from Notes of a Native Son, available through the Philadelphia Free Library — or another narrative passage in which the risk is palpable at the level of the sentence

Critical Reception

• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (craft notes) — Katey Schultz — on how desire and obstacle organize a narrative and lift particular emotion into universal value.
• Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction — Brevity — how the reflective narrator reveals what the experience cost, making stakes legible.
• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — an editor on diagnosing where a manuscript loses its reader and why.

In-Class Practice

Each writer writes one sentence — not for their draft, just a sentence — that names what their narrator stands to lose. Share. Does the draft reflect that loss on every page? We then workshop one writer’s pages with attention to where the stakes are visible and where they disappear.

Discussion Questions

1. In the Baldwin passage, where exactly do you feel what is at risk — and how does the language create that feeling?
2. In one sentence, what does your narrator stand to lose? Does your draft keep that loss present?
3. What is the throughline of your piece — the question it keeps trying to answer beneath the surface?
4. Where in your draft do the stakes go invisible? What happened on those pages?
5. In the workshopped piece, where was the loss palpable, and where did it vanish?
6. Why do you think “nothing is at risk” loses a reader faster than a clumsy sentence does?

Homework

Read your draft and mark every paragraph in which you can feel what the narrator might lose. Note the unmarked paragraphs. Revise one.

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Session 13 — The Reflective Layer

Focus: When to step back from the action and reflect; the difference between meaning imposed and meaning earned.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Reflection is not explanation. A narrator who reflects considers what an experience meant; a narrator who explains tells the reader what to think. The first trusts the reader and deepens the piece; the second flattens it. In revision, watch for the sentences that instruct rather than ponder.
2. Put reflection after the scene has done its work — never before. Let the dramatized moment land first, then step back. Reflection placed ahead of the scene tells the reader the conclusion before they have had the experience, and the scene arrives dead.
3. Over-reflection kills the scene you just built. A vivid moment can be smothered by a paragraph explaining its significance. Often the strongest revision is to cut the reflection entirely and trust the scene to carry the meaning by itself.
4. Distance is a craft problem, especially with recent pain. Reflection requires enough remove to see the experience whole; too close, and the writing becomes raw report rather than understanding. Part of revising memoir is finding the narrator’s vantage point in time.
5. A conceit can organize reflection across a whole piece. A central, recurring metaphor gives the reflective layer a spine — something the narrator keeps returning to and reseeing. It is architecture, not decoration; in revision, look for the image your piece already wants to circle.

Reading

• Mary Karr, a passage from The Liar’s Club or Lit, available through the Philadelphia Free Library — a writer who balances scene and reflection with extraordinary discipline

Critical Reception

• Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction — Brevity — the “Voice of Experience” as the reflective narrator who interprets the events the “Voice of Innocence” reports.
• Mary Poppins and the Art of Sweetening with Scene — Brevity — how a small scene earns the room for an extended meditation.
• John Gardner’s craft notes — Katey Schultz — on lifting particular emotion into a statement of value without lapsing into preaching.

In-Class Practice

Each writer identifies the most reflective passage in their draft. They read it aloud and the group asks: did the scene earn this reflection? Is there too much, too little, or none? We then workshop one writer’s pages with attention to where and how the narrator reflects.

Discussion Questions

1. In the Karr passage, where does scene end and reflection begin — and how does she earn the shift?
2. In your own draft, is your most reflective passage interpreting the experience or instructing the reader?
3. What happens when you place reflection before a scene instead of after it?
4. How much distance do you have from the experience you are writing about? Is it enough?
5. In the workshopped piece, did the reflection deepen the scene or smother it?
6. Is there a central image your piece keeps returning to that could become its conceit?

Homework

Find a moment of reflection in your draft. Try cutting it entirely. Read the piece without it. What do you lose? What do you gain? Then decide.

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Session 14 — Title & Subhead

Focus: Why the title is the first act of the piece — and how to revise it with the same rigor as the prose.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The title is the first act of the piece. It is read before a single sentence and sets expectation, creates a frame, and makes a promise about what is to come. It deserves the same revision rigor as your opening line — not an afterthought slapped on at the end.
2. The working title is rarely the best title. The label you used while writing usually names the subject too literally or echoes the first thing you thought of. Treat it as a placeholder to be replaced, not a decision already made.
3. A resonant title means more after the reader finishes than before. The strongest titles gather meaning as the piece accumulates; what looked plain at the start lands differently at the end. In revision, test whether your title rewards a reader who has finished the work.
4. Subheads are a structural tool, not just an organizational one. In essays and memoir, subheads can control pacing, signal shifts in time or register, and create white space that lets a piece breathe. Used well, they do craft work, not just signposting.
5. Generate many candidates, then choose. Producing ten title options — fast, without judgment — frees you from your first idea and surfaces the one that is most honest to the piece. The right title is usually found by overproduction, not by waiting for inspiration.

Reading

• A selection of working titles from famous essays and stories alongside their final titles — distributed in class, with examination of what changed and why; supporting material through the Philadelphia Free Library

Critical Reception

• Choose the Perfect Title for Your Novel or Memoir: 7 Authors Offer Tips — Jane Friedman — working authors on generating candidates, escaping the working title, and finding the resonant one.
• William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style — Project Gutenberg — on choosing a suitable design and holding to it, the principle behind a title that frames the whole.
• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — an editor on the small, decisive choices — titles among them — that shape how a book is received.

In-Class Practice

Each writer generates five possible titles for their piece in five minutes. Share. The group responds to each: what does it promise? Does the draft keep that promise? We then workshop one writer’s pages, with specific attention to whether the current title is doing its work.

Discussion Questions

1. Among the working-versus-final titles we examined, which change most improved the piece — and what did it fix?
2. What does your current title promise a reader? Does your draft keep that promise?
3. Is your title literal or resonant? Would it mean more after a reader finishes?
4. Could subheads do structural work in your piece, or would they interrupt it?
5. In the workshopped piece, was the title doing its job, or working against the writing?
6. Why do you think the first title we reach for is so rarely the best one?

Homework

Generate a list of ten possible titles for your piece. Test the top three against the draft: does the piece earn each title? Which is most honest?

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Session 15 — Working with Feedback

Focus: How to receive a critique; how to give one; what to do with notes that contradict each other.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. There are two kinds of editorial notes: diagnostic and prescriptive. A diagnostic note names the problem (“I lost the timeline here”); a prescriptive note proposes a fix (“add a date”). Learning to tell them apart is the foundation of working with any feedback you receive.
2. Diagnostic notes are gold; prescriptive notes are dangerous. A reader is almost always right about where something went wrong and almost always unreliable about how to fix it — because the fix is yours to invent. Trust the diagnosis; treat the prescription as one option among many.
3. Apply the rule of two. If two independent readers report the same confusion, trust it, even when they propose contradictory fixes. Their agreement on the symptom is data; their disagreement on the cure is noise.
4. “I don’t like this” is not a usable note — translate it. Liking is not information. The job, whether you are receiving the note or giving one, is to convert taste into a located, specific observation about the text. Decode what the reader actually stumbled over.
5. Read your own notes three days later, with distance. The sting fades and the signal clarifies. The mature revision skill is deciding, calmly, which notes to act on, which to act on partially, and which to consciously decline — because not every note is right for your piece.

Reading

• The instructor’s own experience with editorial feedback at Houghton Mifflin and Clark Boardman Callaghan — anonymized examples of notes that improved manuscripts and notes that had to be diplomatically disregarded; supporting craft reading through the Philadelphia Free Library

Critical Reception

• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — a great editor on how to give a note a writer can actually use — and when to hold back.
• Revision Advice from the Judges’ Table — Brevity — editors translating vague dissatisfaction into specific, actionable diagnosis.
• The Latest Draft — Brevity — on using trusted readers and critique — then waiting before you respond to it.

In-Class Practice

Each writer reads three notes they have received on their draft (from this workshop or elsewhere) and categorizes them: diagnostic, prescriptive, or unclear. How would you act on each? We then workshop one writer’s pages, with the added exercise of the group each writing one diagnostic note and one prescriptive note — and then discussing the difference.

Discussion Questions

1. Of the three notes you brought, which were diagnostic, which prescriptive, and which unclear?
2. Recall a note that stung but turned out to be right. What made it hard to hear, and what made it true?
3. Have two readers ever given you the same diagnosis with opposite fixes? How did you resolve it?
4. When you write a note for someone else, how do you keep it about the text rather than your taste?
5. In the workshopped piece, which group note was most useful — and was it diagnostic or prescriptive?
6. How do you decide, in good conscience, to decline a note?

Homework

Take the most challenging note you have received on your draft this term. Write one paragraph explaining your response to it, as if to an editor. Then decide: act on it, partially act on it, or consciously decline.

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Session 16 — Sending Work Out & Capstone Reading

Our final evening does double duty. We begin by turning outward — toward the practical reality of sending finished work into the world — and we end by turning back toward this room, hearing one another’s revised pages aloud and marking the arc of sixteen weeks. Both halves belong together: the work of revision ends not when a piece is perfect, but when it is ready to leave your hands.

Focus: The practical reality of submission — cover letters, literary magazines, rejection — and the celebration of finished, or near-finished, work.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Revision ends when a piece is ready to leave your hands, not when it is perfect. Perfection is not available; readiness is. Knowing when to stop revising and send work out is itself a craft judgment — the final discipline of the term.
2. Know the four publishing paths before you send anything. The Big Five, mid-size independents, small literary presses, and self-publishing each ask different things and offer different rewards. Choosing where to send is a real decision, not an accident; match the venue to the piece and your stage.
3. The cover letter is three plain sentences — no apology, no explanation, no plea. State the piece and word count, say briefly why this journal, and thank them. The bio is two sentences of current credits in the third person; if you have none, say so honestly. Editors respect plainness.
4. Rejection is the climate, not the exception. Working writers accumulate rejections by the hundreds. Most are form letters meaning only “not this, not now”; a personal note is a real signal worth honoring. The two-week rule — wait, don’t react, then send it out again — keeps a rejection from becoming a verdict.
5. A finished piece deserves a reading. The capstone half of tonight returns to the room: hearing revised pages aloud marks the distance traveled in sixteen weeks and reminds us that work exists to be received by readers.

Reading

• The instructor’s own cover letters and rejection slips — shared generously and with full context about what happened next. And, for the second half: none. Tonight, the writers in this room are the texts.

Critical Reception

• The Art of Editing No. 1: Robert Gottlieb — The Paris Review — the view from inside a publishing house: what editors do with the manuscripts that arrive.
• The Paris Review Interviews archive — The Paris Review — a free trove of working writers describing how their finished work found its way into the world.
• William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style — Project Gutenberg — the plainness and economy a strong cover letter should model.

In-Class Practice

Sending Work Out (about 60 minutes)

This first hour is a brief, practical orientation — enough to get a finished piece out the door, no more. Publishing is its own large subject, and I have deliberately kept tonight light. If it grabs you, see the note at the end of this section.

Part 1 — The publishing landscape, briefly (20 min).

There are, in plain terms, four paths a writer can take, and it helps to know them before you send anything anywhere.

The Big Five. These are the large traditional houses — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan — and their many imprints. They publish at scale, pay advances, and almost always require a literary agent as the door in. For most writers at our stage this is a long-term aspiration rather than a first step, and that is perfectly fine.

Mid-size independents. Houses like Graywolf, Coffee House, Tin House, or Milkweed sit between the giants and the small presses. They are serious, respected, and often more open to literary work the big houses find uncommercial. Some take agented submissions only; some open their doors directly for short windows.

Small literary presses. This is where a great many working writers actually publish, and there is nothing second-rate about it — it is honorable, careful work. These presses pay little or nothing up front, print modest runs, and offer something the big houses rarely do: genuine editorial attention and a long belief in your book. Most of my own books have come into the world this way.

Self-publishing and indie. The tools are now good enough that a writer can produce a professional book independently. It asks you to also become your own editor, designer, and marketer, and it carries no gatekeeper’s stamp — which is both its freedom and its risk. Done with rigor it is a legitimate path; done carelessly it shows.

Part 2 — The cover letter, the bio, and the basic process (15 min).

Most journals take submissions through an online portal (often Submittable) or by email. You attach the piece, paste a short cover letter, and wait. The cover letter is not a sales pitch and not a confession. It is three sentences, professional and plain.

Dear Editors,

Please consider my short story “The Kitchen Door” (3,200 words) for publication in The Galway Review. I have long admired the journal’s commitment to plain, unsentimental fiction, and I believe this piece would sit comfortably in your pages. Thank you for your time and for the work you do.

With appreciation, [Name]

Notice what is absent: no apology, no explanation of what the story “means,” no plea. The literary bio that often accompanies it is two sentences, in the third person, listing current credits only:

[Name]’s fiction has appeared in Impspired and The Galway Review. She lives and writes in Philadelphia.

If you have no credits yet, say less, not more: “[Name] is a writer living in Philadelphia. This is her first submission.” That is honest, and editors respect it. Track what you send in a simple spreadsheet — piece, journal, date sent, response — and feel free to submit the same piece to several journals at once (simultaneous submission), withdrawing it elsewhere if one accepts it.

Part 3 — Rejection (15 min).

Rejection is not the exception in this work; it is the climate. A working writer accumulates them by the hundreds and then the thousands. I have a drawer of them, and I tell you that plainly because no one told me. Most of what comes back is a form letter — a polite, identical no that means only “not this, not now,” and nothing about your worth. Occasionally you receive a personal note, even a line of encouragement or a “please send us more”; that is a real signal, worth more than it looks, and worth honoring by sending them more.

My rule, learned the hard way, is the two-week rule: when a rejection arrives, do not respond to it. Do not reply, do not argue, do not spiral. Wait two weeks. Then, having let it settle, send the piece out somewhere new — often the very same day you next sit down to work. A rejection is information about one editor on one afternoon. It is not a verdict.

Part 4 — Cover-letter drafting and the capstone reading.

Each writer drafts a three-sentence cover letter describing their piece to a journal they have identified as a potential home. Share aloud; the group responds. Each writer then reads aloud for approximately five minutes from their revised piece — a passage of their choosing. After each reading, the room takes thirty seconds of silence before responding. The response is not a critique; it is a reflection: What will I carry from this piece?

A note on going further: If you found this session useful, Mr. Mulhern offers a full sixteen-session course on this material — see The Writing Life: Getting Published in the salon catalog.

Closing Remarks: Mr. Mulhern will offer brief remarks on what he has observed in this room over sixteen weeks — not grades, not rankings, but specific observations about the craft work he has watched each writer do.

Celebration: This is a workshop, not a class, and workshops don’t end — they pause. Writers are encouraged to stay in contact, keep workshopping informally, and bring their work to the wider world.

Discussion Questions

1. After sixteen weeks, how do you now know when a piece is ready to leave your hands rather than perfect?
2. Of the four publishing paths, which fits the piece you have revised this term — and why?
3. What did writing a three-sentence cover letter teach you about describing your own work plainly?
4. How will you use the two-week rule the next time a rejection arrives?
5. Listening to the capstone readings, what single craft move did you watch a colleague master this term?
6. What is the one habit from this workshop you intend to carry into every revision from now on?

Homework

Before you leave, choose one finished or near-finished piece you are ready to send into the world. Then research two target venues that genuinely fit it — read a little of what each one actually publishes before you decide. Write down the piece and the two venues. That is your assignment: not someday, but this week.

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