July 6 @ 12:00 pm – August 24 @ 2:00 pm EDT
Expand your writer’s toolkit by experimenting with essay and article structures. This eight-week, small-group class provides enough time and focus to dive deeply into new techniques and develop your craft.
[Limited to 12 students]
This event has been rescheduled
Live On Zoom | Sundays, July 6 – August 24 | 12-2 pm Eastern
Nonfiction
The best first drafts are often shapeless, with fragmentary scenes and images, anecdotes and episodes; it’s in the revision process that we more fully understand how to develop and connect these elements as we carve out the shapes of our stories.
We’ll look at how the narrative arc underlies different approaches, from straightforward, traditional presentations to offshoots of the lyric essay such as braids and collages, to the many varieties of borrowed forms that we find in “hermit crab” essays. You will read great examples and try many shapes. Over 8 weeks, you can choose to write about one subject in a variety of structures, or let the shapes inspire an essay you hadn’t planned to write.
Through brief reading assignments and lectures, discussions of each shape/form, exercises, sharing our results, and engaging in two workshop discussions of essays of approximately 2000 words or less, we will explore a variety of approaches to our material to unlock new ideas and expand your writing craft.
Bring a project, an idea, or simply your curiosity. Leave with new work, sharper tools, and a deeper understanding of how form can elevate your nonfiction.
Over these eight weeks, you will …
- GENERATE new material as you experiment with different approaches
- FIND shapes for stories you’ve always wanted to tell
- EXPLORE the key elements that make a story work no matter what the form
- DISCOVER innovative forms to find the right one for your material
- RECEIVE feedback to help make your work more publishable
For intermediate to advanced writers looking to:
- Shape a particular essay
- Generate fresh material
- Refresh their creative approach
- Experiment with structure while making their work more publishable
For more about this topic by Nancy McCabe…
- Unlocking the Power of Hermit Crab Essays in Writing | Brevity Blog
- As Necessary as a Heartbeat: In Defense of the Narrative Arc | The Brevity Blog
- Creative Nonfiction or Fiction: On Choosing the Best Genre for Our Material | Brevity Blog
- Many Ways of Visualizing Story Structures | Brevity Blog
Closed captioning is available. ✔
Think you might miss a class? No worries, replays will be available. ✔
ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTOR
NANCY MCCABE is the author of nine books. Her memoir-in-essays Can This Marriage Be Saved? (Missouri 2020) are shaped around hermit crab forms and extended metaphors. Recent books also include the comic novel The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium (Outpost 19, 2024), and the Young Adult novel Vaulting through Time (CamCat 2023). Her middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground (Fitzroy/Regal House) is forthcoming in spring 2025. Her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Salon, Newsweek, The Brevity Blog, and the Ploughshares Blog, received a Pushcart, and been listed ten times as notable in Best American anthologies.
Testimonials from past students:
“The Shapes of Stories is a valuable online class for writers at any level of their craft. Dr. McCabe deftly balances challenging her writers to push beyond their comfort zone with insightful, positive support. She helped me experiment with a variety of different narrative structures, including the hermit crab and collage formats. Dr. McCabe’s informative lessons are linked with a remarkably well-researched breadth of readings and outside resources. Her discussion questions and active encouragement of peer interactions added depth to the class. I am a far better writer because of her class.”
— Denise Park Parsons, Author, Touchstone: A Life Unseen
“This course was invaluable in helping me find a viable structure for my memoir. The course material and the generous amount of feedback from Nancy were excellent and provided useful insights into how I could focus my diverse material into a well-structured whole.”— Diana Gittins, Writer and Poet
THE FINE PRINT
We understand that life can get in the way of your plans. We want you to be able to get the most out of your course, and our refund policy is designed to balance your need for flexibility with our deadlines and obligations to our teachers.
Before the first class, you may request a refund (less a $25 processing fee).
After class begins, you may request a refund for the remaining value of the course (less a $25 processing fee).
No refunds will be available after the third class.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
