Be Your Own Best Editor: An Essay Revision Intensive with Lilly Dancyger—Jan. 25

Stuck on an essay draft? This one-day session will help you break it apart and put it back together again better than ever.

You’ve written a personal essay, you’ve revised it, maybe even had a friend read it and give you feedback, but it’s still not quite up to snuff. You know it could be a great piece, but something isn’t quite clicking. Now what?

Revising is an absolutely essential part of the writing process, but sometimes it can be hard to see your own work with a critical eye—especially a piece you’ve already been working on for a while, one you’ve read so many times you can’t tell anymore whether it’s brilliant or awful.

During this one-day course, we’ll experiment with different techniques to find a new way into your draft—seeing it with fresh eyes so you can cut away the excess, dig deeper into the richest ideas, and take a fresh approach to structure.

What you will learn

We’ll do a series of short exercises together to get the wheels turning, and then students will work through additional written exercises on their own time after class ends. Through this process, you’ll polish one essay, and learn techniques you can apply whenever you get stuck on future pieces as well. This course is designed for experienced writers who want help shaking things up a bit, as well as newer writers who feel daunted by the prospect of self-editing.

Come prepared with an essay you want to work on (can be any length and any stage of development!).

Workshop takeaways

• How to approach revision as the fun part, how to see an essay they've been working on for a while with fresh eyes and new excitement, and how to drill deeper into what they're really trying to say.

• A new, more focused and polished draft of an existing essay

• Tools to use again and again in future revisions

• Hopefully, a new excitement for revision as the most fun and creatively expansive part of writing

Additional info

This workshop will be recorded for the convenience of those unable to attend live. The recorded session will be emailed to participants the following day.

About the Instructor

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love, a collection of personal and critical essays about the power and complexity of female friendship; and Negative Space (SFWP, 2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, Off Assignment, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more.