Course Syllabus
Creative Nonfiction Boot Camp (10-week)
View CourseKick-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.
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.
How it works: The writing can be done in one of two ways. Students can choose a longer subject to write about for a week or more, and add 300 words to their essay each day. Or they can write 300 words each day in response to a writing prompt—a new prompt will be provided Monday through Thursday.
On Fridays students will choose 800 words from the writing they have completed during the week and send it to the instructor for feedback. During the weekend students will post a paragraph of comments on the work of at least two fellow students.
Each week provides:
- daily prompts to help you generate new writing
- instructor feedback on 800 words
- opportunities for feedback from peers
- discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
Student participation requirements to receive instructor feedback: Though the goal is to write every weekday, students will still receive instructor feedback as long as they post 300 words per day on at least 3 weekdays and participate weekly in the classroom.
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.