Pulling Threads, Making Clay

This comment from Peg during the first Essay in Twelve Steps intensive made my day and exemplifies the grand and glorious challenge we are tackling together now. Those of you engaging are brave, devoted, curious, and honest. You are attentive, clear, and willing. You are writers.

This week’s structured prompt will lead you across a major milestone with your essay, a milestone that takes you from prewriting to essay writing (even while still acknowledging that you will inevitably continue writing words, sentences, paragraphs, and scenes that do not make the final cut into your essay—writing is inefficient and unruly, and most working writers acknowledge that they usually write at least two to three times as many words as end up in a final draft. First we make the granite, then we carve it!).

Before we jump in with Step Five (we’re almost halfway through the intensive!), I want to let you know a couple of things:

1. First, Writing in the Dark (Live Workshop)!

   On Monday, February 24 we’ll open registration for the next live, synchronous (virtual on Zoom) session of Writing in the Dark: The WORKSHOP themed: “The Art of Subtext,” and in it we’ll explore a range of craft elements we can use to deepen (and heighten!) our writing, regardless of genre or length, such as writing around the thing, objects as emotional proxies, gesture, habit, and avoidance, interior subtext without interior monologue, silence, white space, and implication, and revision to heighten what isn’t said.

   If you haven’t joined the waitlist for Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP yet, you still can do so here (joining the waitlist does not guarantee a spot in the workshop, but it does ensure you will get a direct email a few days before general registration opens; this workshop is capped at 20 and always sells out).

2. Second, my Paris Writers memoir masterclass is filling quickly—I received an email this morning that