Class Description

You’ve ventured into the wonderfully difficult process of drafting short stories or a novel. But as the next phase begins, questions arise: How do you know what needs improvement? What’s the best approach to make your prose better? Whose feedback should you implement? In this ten-week workshop, we will aim to clarify the answer to these questions and leave you with a clear revision path for your fiction. During our time together, we'll focus on the layers of the revisions process—from diagnosis to strategy to implementation—with an eye toward improving your work while staying true to the original vision. Each week, we will discuss a different story or novel excerpt as a way to identify what tends to be effective on the page, the elements and techniques you can glean, and how you should deploy them in your own drafts. We will workshop up to a max of 50 pages (two separate 25-page installments) of your stories or novel in class, with written feedback provided in advance. At the end of the course, we will do an overview of agent queries, journal & publisher submissions, as well as a wrap-up on our revision conversations. Please note that you will be required to complete the weekly readings outside of class, as well as reading classmates' pages, and come prepared for discussion and workshop each week. LEVEL: This workshop is for writers with at least two completed short stories or 50 pages of a novel, looking to both receive feedback as well as reciprocate and learn from the process. DARIEL SUAREZ is the author of The Playwright's House, finalist for the Rudolfo Anaya Fiction Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, and A Kind of Solitude, winner of the Spokane Prize. A City of Boston inaugural Artist Fellow, Dariel has been awarded the First Lady Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize and an International Latino Book Award. His prose has appeared in Best American Essays, The Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, LitHub, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among others. Dariel earned his MFA in Fiction at Boston University and now resides in the MetroWest area with his wife and daughter. MEMBER DISCOUNT: ***If you're a PVWW Member, use your Member Discount Code upon checkout! If you're not a member and interested, email us at admin@pioneervalleywriters.com, with subject "Membership."