STRUCTURE FROM CHAOS: A Two-Day Class on Making Shape and Finding Our Way Through Longform Nonfiction Projects

Two Classes: Sunday, April 7th & Sunday, April 14th

10:00-12:30 PST / 11:00 - 1:30 MST / 12:00 - 2:30 CST / 1:00-3:30 EST

The beginning stages of a writing project can feel like an ecstatic mess: all possibility and promise. When I started my new book, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, I was working on pure instinct and a sense that the various stories, research interests and ethical pursuits that preoccupied me might hang together in a book. That was a nice few months. But ultimately I had to shape all this material into something cohesive. For it to be a book, there needed to be some structure that held it all together and allowed the reader to move forward with clarity and ease. Ordering the mess is often the hardest work there is. 

In this class, which will meet twice, we’ll be looking at various strategies and methods to help us develop a structure for our longform nonfiction projects (be they books or long essays or something in between). How do we order and organize our ideas? How do we figure out how various elements contained in the text–research, reporting, memoir and personal narrative, expository writing–  fit together? How do we balance story and idea, and create a structure that moves the reader forward? How do we figure out a project’s shape? 

This class is appropriate for anyone working on a long, ambitious nonfiction project at any stage–and will be particularly useful for folks working on hybrid work (combining elements of memoir and reporting, for instance) and those working on a piece demanding a form not strictly linear in nature. The two 2.5 hour sessions will include a combination of lectures, in-class writing and mapping activities, small group conversations and Q&A, with some optional exercises to undertake in the week between.  

Recordings will be made available after the class. 

Limited scholarships are available