Shape, Sharpen, and Shine gives you the opportunity to take one of your gorgeous raw Wild Writing pieces and polish it into finished work. Memoir, fiction,personal essay, or other forms of short prose are preferred.

Over eight sessions, we will work on honing in on the heart of your piece, clarifying, sharpening, and refining it until every word sings. Topics covered in the course include finding the heart of the piece, narrative structures, figuring out what to zoom in on and what to skip over, strategies for revision, pathways to publication, and more. Each person will have an opportunity to submit work once to the whole group as well as to the instructor for verbal feedback. There’s also an opportunity to submit revised work to the instructor for written feedback. You’ll emerge with a beautiful polished gem.

Come with a rough draft of a piece that you want to polish into finished work. Maximum length 2000 words.

Class 1: Finding the Heart of the Story

✨ Introductions: Who we are, what we’re working on, our goals for the class. Share a small excerpt of your work-in-progress.
✨ Writing exercise: Finding the heart of the story
✨ Exercise: What’s your writing rhythm?
✨ Meet with accountability buddies and discuss goals for the week
✨ Go over guidelines for discussing work, based on the Amherst Writers’ and Artists’ Method.

Class 2: Creative Non-Fiction Overview and How to Make Your Writing Sing

✨ Overview of different forms of creative nonfiction
✨ What are the important questions to ask when revising your work?
✨ Writing Exercise: Active verbs
✨ Discuss two people’s submissions.

Class 3: What Is Story?

✨ Overview of traditional and non-traditional narrative structures.
✨ The difference between story and plot. (Hint: transformation)
✨ Writing exercise: Seven questions to help define your story.
✨ Discuss two people’s work

Class 4: Narrative Distance: Zooming in and Out

✨ Deciding which moments to zoom in on and which to skip over or summarize.
✨ Summary language vs. in the moment language
✨ Writing exercise: Narrative distance
✨ Discuss two people’s work

Class 5: It’s all in the details

✨ Revealing character and place through salient detail
✨ Writing exercise: Showing vs. telling
✨ Discuss two people’s work

Class 6: Dialogue

✨ Writing effective dialogue: What is revealed, what is concealed
✨ Dialogue writing exercise: differentiating character voices
✨ Four people share portions of revised work and submit revised pieces to Tanya for written comments.

Class 7: Lyric Essay

✨ Overview of the lyric essay form
✨ Writing exercise: Experimenting with form
✨ Four people share portions of revised work and submit revised pieces to Tanya for written comments.

Class 8: Pathways to publication

✨ Overview of strategies and avenues for publication
✨ Writing exercise: Create a vivid summary
✨ Writing exercise: Craft a pitch
✨ Discuss elements of public reading and do a dry run of reading portions of our pieces.

Instructor Bio: Tanya Shaffer is an award-winning playwright, author, writing teacher and writing coach who splits her time between Ann Arbor, Michigan and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her plays have been produced by major regional theatres such as Berkeley Repertory Theatre, TheatreWorks and A Contemporary Theatre and have traveled to over forty cities in the US and Canada. She’s the author of the travel memoir, Somebody’s Heart is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa. Her work has appeared on Salon and in more than a dozen anthologies.She publishes the Substack Tanya Shaffer’s Off-Leash Chronicles, in which she writes on topics ranging from creativity to parenting to travel to spirituality. An early graduate of the Wild Writing teacher training program, she’s been leading Off-Leash Writing Workshops and Memoir & Fiction Workshops since 2018. tanyashaffer.com