The class will focus on character, plot, voice, theme, point of view, and more. Each week we will have a lecture, writing exercise, and workshop with a focus on development notes.

Four sessions will be in San Francisco and the last session is one-on-one over the phone.

DATES: May 5 – Jun 2
TIME: SATURDAYS, 1-3PM
LOCATION: Geary at Polk, San Francisco.
CLASS SIZE: 8 STUDENTS
COST: $250 (Paypal to tony@tonydushane.com)

email: tony@tonydushane.com with any questions.

Tony DuShane is the author and award winning screenwriter of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, directed by Eric Stoltz.

His publishing credits include the San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, The Believer, and The Rumpus.

DuShane teaches novel writing at UCLA Extension.

As novelists and aspiring novelists, we’re all kind of crazy. Every blank page causes stress, the discomfort you feel now as a beginning writer never really goes away, it just becomes slightly easier knowing that you’ll feel the same way for every book and also that most authors worth their salt, even best sellers, even writers who have had their books adapted to film, they feel the same stress in different ways during every new project. (And we don’t worry too much about run-on sentences in first drafts.)

That will be a small part of the exercises and lecture during the first class. 

We set the tone during the first class that every student is on equal footing as we dig into the fundamentals of crafting the novel. We are all here to serve the individual stories to their fullest potential during the workshop.

We’ll work on the tools to get from first draft to a completed draft and what it really takes to make it in the publishing biz. 

Here are some recommended reading that I highly encourage you to add to your reading queue:

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont
This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley
On Writing by Stephen King.