Starts Thursday, January 9, 2025

Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays from 4:00 - 6:00 PM PST

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.

Instructor Michelle Kicherer covers books and music for the San Francisco Chronicle and teaches writing classes in fiction and memoir. She is a former ghostwriter of memoir and nonfiction books and a current writing coach and founder of Banana Pitch Press, an indie press specializing in novellas and memoirellas. Her fiction has appeared in The Master's Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and others. Her debut novella Sexy Life, Hello came out digitally September 2024 and arrives in print March 2025. Willamette Week called it “one of the most compelling short reads of the year.” Michelle aims to have one weird new experience everyday. 

Read an interview with Michelle on Writing the Novella. 

The novella is a cool form of literature somewhere between a short story and a novel. Since it’s somewhere between the two in length, novellas often are somewhere between the two in their complexity as well. With novellas, we have a little more time to advance the plot and explore our characters, but not a whole lot. 

So how do we take best advantage of our pages in the novella form? How do we start a novella? 

In this six-week class, we'll dissect outlines and excerpts from several well-loved novellas, and we’ll read three novellas in their entirety. This course has a workshop component, which is always optional and meant to be as helpful to you as possible. Each student is in a different stage of their novella project, so all levels of completion and experience are welcome. 

A Note on workshops: We will not hold a typical workshop session in this class, but the instructor will provide written feedback on up to 15 pages of each students’ work then will tweak lessons to be as helpful as possible to each individual writer. Students will not be expected to read their peer work aside from the first page. 

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• How to start a novella with an immediate hook
• What each of these three writers set up for and what the story delivers
• How to structure a novella
• What these novellas do (and don’t do) to make them successful stories
• How to brainstorm a new novella (or how to determine what you might be missing)  
• How to start, climax, end and edit a novella

COURSE OUTLINE:

Week One: Strong Openings 

After an intro to the novella, we’ll look at several examples of strong novella openings, which we’ll read and dissect together in class. 

Week Two: Plot vs Aboutness 

In this session, we’ll outline the plot of Old Man and the Sea and learn how to reverse engineer an outline so that we can work backward from plot to “aboutness.” 

Week Three: Conflict and Tension

We always want our reader to be a little worried and curious: how do we give them that “what will happen next” feeling? We’ll look at the novella Cecilia and pick out where the conflict is and how it’s giving us that “I gotta keep reading” feeling. 

Week Four: Identifying themes in my novella 

George Saunders often talks about how he doesn’t know what a story is “about” until he’s written it and gone back in for editing. This week we’ll talk themes, using Liberation Day as our inspiration. 

Week Five: Character (development) 

So who is your character? How is this story revolving around them? How can you tweak the story a bit to strengthen their development? 

Week Six: Reading your work with an editorial eye

We’ll conclude this class by talking about some nitty-gritty of editing. Michelle will include real examples from student work (anonymous, as desired) and layout some step-by-step editing techniques for you to employ on your work after this class. 

CLASS SUPPLIES:

•   Please bring a writing utensil and a notebook.

READING LIST:

• Liberation Day, by George Saunders  
• Cecilia, by K-Ming Change
• The Old Man and the Sea, Earnest Hemmingway 

Each class starts with a short writing warm-up using fiction-focused, generative writing prompts. Writing is such a deeply personal endeavor. My classes provide a safe space to share your questions and insights so we all feel productive and judgment-free. 

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class meets weekly via Zoom. Come prepared for a super fun class with live interaction on Zoom each week and plenty of writing, reading, and talking!

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $395 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

• Instructor: Michelle Kicherer
• Class starts on Thursday, January 9, 2025
• Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays from 4:00 - 6:00 PM PST
  
• Tuition is $395 USD

Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this class.