Course Description for

Essays and Personal Stories

with Gloria Kempton

Registration Fee and Course Length

Prerequisites

Standard course: $180 / 6 weeks. Click here to register.

Extended schedule: $224 / 12 weeks. Click here to register.
Extended course is designed for busy people and gives you two weeks to do each lesson but contains NO additional material.

WritersCollege - Essays and Personal Stories

Course Contacts

Course Description

This is a class for any writer who is motivated to write short pieces based on his or her personal experiences, explorations, dreams, longings, emotions, thoughts, and/or ideas. These pieces can be targeted to magazines or compiled into a book.

By the end of the course you will have an understanding of how to write and market personal stories and essays.

Week 1: Learn the difference between a dramatic personal experience story and an exploratory personal essay. Where do ideas come from? How do we sort through them, learn to choose the best ones and develop them?

Assignment: List three to five ideas for personal experience stories and/or essays.

Week 2: What is a hook? How do I engage the reader? How do I know where to start my story or essay? Learn about the different kinds of openings; anecdotal, dramatic action, question, topic presentation.

Assignment: Choose one of your ideas and write a hook ( the first few paragraphs).

Week 3: Learn how to sustain interest in your story or essay as you move from your hook into the body of the story or essay, how to move your thoughts forward in an essay and the action forward in your story.

Assignment: Write the middle of the story or essay.

Week 4: Coming up with the perfect ending for your essay or story, the kind of ending that will stay with the reader. Learn the different kinds of endings; the challenge, the resolution, the open ending.

Assignment: Complete the story or essay.

Week 5: Learn how to revise so as to make a story or essay better, not worse.

Assignment: Write another story or essay or revise the first one.

Week 6: Learn that marketing is not as hard as it looks. It's a matter of believing in your work and finding like-minded editors. You can do this.

Assignment: Study the market listings. List five markets and come up with a plan for marketing your stories and essays.

Gloria Kempton has two passions: writing and working with writers. As the daughter of a successful freelance writer, she understood from an early age how to arrange the elements of an effective story so as to connect with readers: an action-filled plot, characters the reader will remember, a setting that enhances the plot, conflict that challenges the protagonist, tension-filled dialogue. When she submitted her very first story, it immediately sold. Since then she has published more than 600 stories and articles in more than sixty publications in the juvenile, young adult, family and religious markets.

Gloria has also written two novels and eight nonfiction books. She is currently working on several projects; a mainstream novel, a book of essays about her years as a prison volunteer, and a book for writers on unlocking the unconscious. She coaches writers in the Seattle area and teaches creative writing classes at writers conferences. Gloria is a former Contributing Editor for Writer's Digest magazine, and her most recent book is Dialogue (Writer's Digest Books).

As the former editor of two magazines, acquisitions editor at a publishing house, and a freelance novel and nonfiction book editor at ten major publishing houses, Gloria understands what happens on both sides of the desk. In her classes, you will find support and encouragement, as well as honest evaluation of your work. You can count on being asked a lot of questions that will help you get to the core of what it is that you want to communicate in each piece that you write. Instruction is individualized because you are unique and your writing should reflect your unique voice.