Join me for this two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about how attention and patience shape and deepen a writer’s craft.

My name is Adrienne Brodeur, and I hope you’ll join me for my class: Five Things I’ve Learned as an Editor That Made Me a Better Writer.

For more than three decades, I’ve worked on both sides of the page—first as the founding editor of Zoetrope: All-Story, then as an acquiring editor at Houghton Mifflin, and currently as the Executive Director of Aspen Words. Over the years, I’ve read thousands of submissions, edited more stories and books than I can remember, and had a front-row seat to that mysterious moment when a piece of writing either lifts off the page… or doesn’t.

I’m also a writer myself. My memoir, Wild Game, grew out of years of trying to understand a story I thought I already knew. My novel, Little Monsters, taught me how to hold the chaos of too many choices without rushing to resolve it—how to stay with the uncertainty long enough for something truer to emerge. And I’ve just finished a new novel, Love This Day, which reminded me how much patience—and persistence—the work requires if you want to get it right.

What I’ve come to believe is this: the distance between a good piece of writing and a great one is almost always a matter of attention. Attention to language. Attention to structure. Attention to what the story is actually saying—often just beneath what we think we’re saying.

In this class, I’m going to share five practical, hard-earned lessons from my life as an editor—when my job was to help other people with their work—that I now try to apply to my own. We’ll talk about where authority in a sentence comes from, why over-explaining is the enemy of emotional power, how to recognize when a scene isn’t earning its keep, and what it really means to cut with precision.

Along the way, we’ll look closely at examples, do some live editing, and talk about how to develop the kind of internal editor that sharpens your work without silencing it.

Writing will always involve some mystery—some alchemy—but it’s also a craft. And craft can be learned, practiced, and deepened over time. It’s not magic. It’s attention and patience, and a willingness to see what’s actually on the page.

I look forward to working with you.

— Adrienne