A Workshop On Self-Editing For Writers
Led by Andrew Wille, an experienced editor, this workshop is designed to help writers improve their work-in-progress. Through discussion, exercises and practical advice, it will cover the following matters:
- Clarifying your intention and reading work as an editor
- Craft and technique: focusing your content; choosing your narrative style; refining your voice
- Genre, theme, and writing for your readers
- Seeking and processing feedback
- Submitting your work for publication and thinking about self-publishing
This workshop should be of interest to writers of fiction and narrative non-fiction who have completed drafts or manuscripts in development.
Programme for the day
- 9.45-10.00 Registration
- 10.00-10.30 Introduction: Approaches to revising and editing
- 10.30-11.30 Creating a world: Using character and situation to dig deeper and revisit your intention
- 11.30-11.45 Break
- 11.45-12.45 Crafting your storytelling: How perspective and structure can give your story an edge
- 12.45-14.00 Lunch
- 14.00-15.15 Crafting the page: Working with feedback and refining your voice; paragraphs, sentences, words
- 15.15-15.30 Break
- 15.30-16.45 Connecting: thinking about publishing, including a Q&A with Lennie Goodings, Chair of Virago Press and an award-winning editor who’s worked with many much-loved authors.
- 16.45-17.00 Wrap-up: sharing of resources and final networking
Note: We'll contact you the week before with guidelines for what to bring to class, e.g., copies of an outline.
Workshop Leader
Andrew Wille is a book doctor and writing teacher. At Little, Brown and as a freelance editor he has published and edited many bestselling and critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. After studying and then teaching at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, he introduced contemplative and holistic approaches to creativity into his work. He writes fiction and nonfiction, and blogs and offers resources on writing and publishing at wille.org.
Workshop Guest
Lennie Goodings is Chair of Virago Press. Her authors include Margaret Atwood, Sarah Waters, Marilynne Robinson, Maya Angelou, Sarah Dunant, Sandi Toksvig, Linda Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf, among many other writers. Lennie is herself now writing a book, The Idealistic Publisher, while still acquiring and editing books for Virago. She is Canadian, married, the mother of two and lives in London.