with Amy Shearn
You've gotten through the first draft of your essay/poem/short story/book/epic trilogy. Or maybe you've just outlined it. Or maybe you have a complete first chapter and then you got stuck. But you have something on the page. It was hard, but you did it! And now, hold on, there's more?
As the poet Robert Graves said, “There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.”
Revision often gets a bad rap, but it can be the most satisfying and meaningful part of the writing process. Not to be confused with copy-editing or fact-checking, revision is more about rewriting, reshaping, re-visioning the work. It's a hopeful process, and a terribly interesting one, honestly. In this class, we'll go over the Three Reads of Revision, i.e. three ways to look at a draft in order to get it as polished as you can. We'll also look at prompts and techniques that you can use no matter what you're revising. Bring your works-in-progress -- we'll do some in-class revision. By the end of our session, you should have more clarity on where your draft is headed.
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WHERE:
Online via ZOOM(link will be sent the week of 1st class)
DATE:Sunday, November 3
TIME:
10am-12pm______________________
LIMITED TO 7 STUDENTS
For more info, call 203.227.3250 or email info@WestportWriters.org
About the Instructor...
Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, How Far Is the Ocean From Here, and the forthcoming Dear Edna Sloane (Red Hen Press, 2024) and Animal Instinct (Putnam, 2025). She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Story Studio Chicago, the Yale Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. Amy's personal essays have appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, O: The Oprah Magazine, and in the recent anthology The Lonely Stories. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.