Danielle Lazarin

Envisioning Your Short Story Collection

Ever wonder if your numerous short stories are a collection, and what to do with them if you think they could be with a little (or a lot of) effort? How do you know if stories belong together, what might be missing to unify them, or how to order, talk about, and ultimately sell them as a cohesive book?

In this two-hour seminar, I’ll walk you through the experience of conceptualizing and completing a short story collection that’s ready for agents and editors. We’ll discuss basics like how many stories make a collection, if you really need to publish in literary magazines before you get an agent, and not-so-basics like discovering and strengthening thematic connections between stories, and the uncomfortable question of whether or not story collections sell.

Writers in this course will complete some brief assessments of their existing material and leave with a clear sense of the practical steps and creative process involved in making a dream of a story collection into a marketable manuscript ready for agents and editors. There will be ample time for q&a at the end of the session, which will be recorded and available asynchronously for a month after the session.

Time to revise your draft! Get out your scissors, your matches, your most brutal thinking cap, the echoes of every reader who told you to cut cut cut till you whip that baby into a smaller, leaner version of itself, right?

Wrong.

What if I told you the best way to strengthen your draft was by rejecting the mindset of trimming, fixing, and slashing (and the language of diet culture to boot)? That the best way to revise was writing more, writing in, to think in expansion rather than contraction? What if I also told you revision could be fun? That you could still make discoveries, the kind that set you on fire during your first stage of your project?

In this six week hands-on craft class, I'll teach you how to refine your draft through addition. An underutilized tool of revision, generative work is as necessary for completed drafts — fiction that already has made its preliminary choices regarding setting, characters, voice, timeframe, and so on — as it is in early drafting stages. I'll help you find the same freedom and play you felt when starting a project at this stage when you're trying to bring it closer to the finish line.  

First, we'll identify opportunities for generative revision in completed drafts using your existing text, your instincts, and a few new tricks. Then we'll dive into the work of deliberate experimentation, deepening and layering those drafts by paying close attention to their potential and parameters (and when necessary, blowing them open). Though not a workshop, the group serves as a space for accountability and sharing process, ideas, and of course, support and guidance. We'll read the occasional craft essay, learn concrete strategies for revision via generation, and put them into practice during our sessions. This course works best for students who have a draft of a novel or multiple short stories ready for revision.

In Person Fiction Workshop (NYC)

Real talk: there is simply no substitute for being in a room with other writers, discussing writing. If you've never experienced the magic of an in-person workshop, participating in a compassionate, conversation-oriented circle of other writers who show up for your work as wholeheartedly as they do for their own, your mind might be blown by what a writing space can offer outside the confines of Zoom.

In this 8 week fiction workshop, we'll gather in person in New York City* to read your work-in-progress, examining its idiosyncratic workings, choices, and opportunities, and engage in thoughtful, useful discussion about the next steps for the draft and you, the writer. I run writer-centered workshops focused on noticing, not correcting or changing. I see our job as a workshop as one of helping you write the story you want to by drawing your attention to the choices you’ve made and to others you might want to make in the future. I see my role as guiding the writers in workshop towards being support systems for one another, sharing my expertise and experience, and keeping us focused.

You’ll have two opportunities to workshop either short stories or novel chapters. In addition to extensive notes on the draft from your peers and myself, every participant gets a private conference with me via Zoom to discuss their work, writing practice, and goals. But more than that, you’ll learn how to give, receive, and make actionable feedback, sharpening the reading and editing skills that will make you a better independent processor of your own work. You’ll get to know one another through your work, your questions and curiosities, your perspective as a writer and as a reader, and hopefully make some lasting connections as writing peers.

*Location to be finalized closer to start date, but will be somewhere between 14th and 34th street in Manhattan.  

Is this workshop for you?
• This course is for writers with work ready, or very close to ready, for feedback. Manuscripts for workshop should be single stories or multiple chapters totaling no more than 8,000 words. You'll need to have two of those more or less ready to go in the time we meet.
• Have work that needs feedback but never been in a workshop before? Does the word workshop fill you with funny feelings? No problem! I'll walk you through being a good workshop participant and make sure no one bites.
• If you’re looking to workshop fantasy, romance, science fiction, or other work that embraces conventions of a single genre, this probably isn’t the course for you. My expertise, and the class focus, will be on literary fiction. If you have questions about what this means and whether the course can help you, feel free to reach out to me at backtalklazarin@gmail.com to discuss.