Editing Your Work Like a Reader: Tangible Editing Tactics to Tackle Plot and Strengthen Language with Michelle Kicherer— June 12

Zadie Smith once said that the secret to editing your work is to “become its reader instead of its writer.” So how does one do that?

First, we’ll break editing down into three stages:

• First drafts

• Early drafts

• Final drafts

For each of these stages, we’ll look at applicable tactics for editing, and look at some before and after examples of scenes and entire plots that were edited.

• First drafts: we’ll talk about writing style and how/if/when to edit yourself along the way

• With early drafts: we’ll look at how to take an assessment of plot and look for areas to cut and areas to expand, as well as how to use language most effectively to tell your story

• With final drafts, we’ll look at applicable tools to tweak language for both better storytelling and more exciting prose

Workshop Takeaway

• How to start a story with the right hook

• How to pinpoint what a story is about and to edit toward that “aboutness”

• How to rearrange a story’s structure

• How to look for elements of a story that could be missing

• What oh what to cut 

• When language can amplify plot 

• How to read your work like its reader

Additional info

If you can't attend this class live, it will be recorded! Students will receive a recording the day after the class, and it will be available for 30 days.

About the Instructor

Michelle Kicherer covers books and music for the San Francisco Chronicle and Willamette Week. Her fiction has appeared in The Master’s Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and others, and received the Marion Hood Boess Haworth Prize in Fiction, the Leila Aba Saba Prize for Prose Writing and a Portland Regional Arts and Culture Grant. Michelle teaches writing classes in fiction and memoir and always encourages her students to get a little weirder. Her debut novella SEXY LIFE, HELLO came out March 6 on Banana Pitch Press.