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Developing a Creative Writing Research Toolkit 6-Week Open-Genre Zoom Workshop, Starts Friday, May 19th, 2023
$395.00

Developing a Creative Writing Research Toolkit 6-Week Open-Genre Zoom Workshop, Starts Friday, May 19th, 2023

Begins Friday, May 19th, 2023

Now Enrolling!

This course meets Fridays from 1:00-3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom beginning May 19th, 2023.

Open to All writers!

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

**This Class is Open to Fiction & Nonfiction Writers**

Taught by Adin Dobkin, the author of Sprinting Through No Man's Land. His essays and reporting have been featured in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Catapult, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. He received his MFA from Columbia University.

The ingredients that make up a short story, essay, novel, or poem vary in the lengths gone to find them. A writer may stop an extra moment on a street corner to consider the ‘going out of business’ sign they just saw and how it came to be; they might read conference proceedings from the American Seismological Society to better understand the language scientists use among themselves when talking about earthquakes; they might move to rural Texas for three years in an attempt to have people talk to them not as a visiting writer but as a resident.

In most every creative work, research was used for inspiration, the development of a character, subject, setting, or world, or to grapple with potential narrative structures. And that only accounts for a few of the ways in which writers mine the world outside their own experience to enrich their works.

In hearing how writers came upon these puncta, these details that stop a reader on the page, someone may hear of countless banker boxes filled with photocopied archival documents. They may learn of the single carbon-copied sheet a writer stumbled upon that changed their entire understanding of a story. Less frequently described is how the writer created the circumstances that led to that eureka moment.

This is especially true for creative writers who use the tools of other disciplines but often rely on autodidacticism to guide them. Facts and research help build immersive stories and meaningful and authentic prose, but how writers use those bytes of information varies depending on a writer’s sense of ethics, their consideration of formal structures, and the unique interplay of fact and fiction available to those not strictly bound by journalistic or historical obligations.

In this course, we’ll consider the ways and whys of research for fiction and nonfiction and how the results of those methods might be folded into an in-progress work. Writers will discuss how to think about research in relation to their work, learn some common research methods and forms, and read how others have sought to balance aesthetics with the conveyance of something true. In addition, writers will participate in an open-ended workshop during the final weeks of class that will allow them to share research dilemmas they have encountered and consider specific ways they might integrate research into their work.

Class meetings will be held over video chat, using Zoom accessed from your private class page. While you can use Zoom from your browser, we recommend downloading the desktop client so you have access to all platform features.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS

  • How, when, and why to use archival searches, interviews, academic reviews, and experiential research, among other research methods.
  • How different sources can be used in conjunction with one another to create effects in a reader.
  • How to develop a research plan and how to respond to roadblocks in finding sources.
  • How to consider personal ethics in writing about real life and history.

COURSE EXPECTATIONS:

Each class will combine a lecture and craft discussion with a discussion of a reading. In the last four weeks of the course, half of each meeting will be taken up with an abbreviated, research-centric workshop.

Students will be expected to read and contribute to class discussions as well as share a 10-20 double-spaced page workshop submission, if they'd like. Optional craft assignments will be available to students who are just starting a project.

COURSE SKELETON:

Week 1: Planning Research

Week 2: Archives and Interviews

Week 3: Academic Surveys and Experiential Research

Week 4: Writing and Synthesizing Research

Week 5: When Problems Arise

Week 6: The Ethics of Research 

PAYMENT OPTIONS:
You can pay for the course in full or use Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class is entirely online and will meet via Zoom.

  • Instructor: Adin Dobkin

  • Class size limited to 8 writers

  • October 26th, 2020 to December 14th, 2020

  • Course is fully ONLINE; students can work according to their own schedule within weekly deadlines. Once you have enrolled the instructor will send you a link to our online classroom, provided via Wet Ink.

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

Instructor Adin Dobkin is the author of Sprinting Through No Man's Land. His essays and reporting have been featured in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Catapult, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. He received his MFA from Columbia University.