Join us in this live, two-hour class and discover the Five Things We’ve Learned about the ways that great writing delivers genuine pleasure for the reader – and the writer.

The things people say about writing—that it’s hard, it’s frustrating, it’s painful, it’s lonely. You want a different way to feel? You’ve come to the right place. We think writing should be a pleasure to produce —or why bother? We think the pleasure the writer feels while making something is partly what arouses pleasure for the reader. Pleasure for the writer and pleasure for the reader, that’s what we’ll talk about.

Writing feels hard if you really don’t want to write the thing in front of you. So, don’t do it. Don’t write unless you really want to sink your teeth into a story. You need to be seduced by something calling to you. Write because you need to find out something you can only dig out by writing. It’s not going to come another way, this thing you are after. The digging is part of the pleasure.

We have a little checklist I apply to my work to see if it’s ready to share with other people. It’s a list of five elements, and in our time together, we’ll take up each one, and you can ask questions as we move along.

Here are the five elements:

  • Start in the middle.
  • Fail to arrive.
  • Remember to love something.
  • Make the reader laugh.
  • Make the reader hot.

In sum: no chronological order (or memory as you recall it), plus love, sex, and comedy.

Sometimes people think, “Oh, my subject is stupid and no one will care.” If you care, you can make the reader care. You can seduce them the same way the story has seduced you. How do you seduce the reader? There is only one way in writing. You seduce the reader with the way you use language. You have to fall in love with the pleasure of manipulating words until they prompt a reaction in the reader’s body and mind. The reader is caught off guard. The reader is held in suspense. The reader encounters something familiar they’ve never seen before.

During our two-hours together, we’ll offer techniques, a tool kit of craft and form elements you can practice. Writing is an art form. The techniques are smoke and mirrors, but they don’t need to be secrets. There is no actual magic here, no waiting for inspiration, no sense of having talent or not having talent. You work hard, you practice, you experiment, you let go of fantasy outcomes, you get better. We promise. 

What is a seductive first sentence and how do you invent one? That is one of the things we’ll talk about. We’ll talk about ways to transform an abstract noun into an image or a piece of dramatic narrative instead of a predigested piece of analysis. Analysis and summary are evaluations and judgments the narrator has arrived at. They are reports of a finding and don’t show the reader the moments that produced the summary. For example, instead of writing “I felt ambivalent,” you could say, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted never to see Katherine again or I wanted to be her.”

We’ll talk about producing monologues, where the narrator speaks directly to the reader, reflecting on episodes in two time frames: the way the narrator felt in the past while an event was taking place, and the changed way the narrator feels now while capturing the past moment for the reader. What has been gained or lost in time? Working in these two time frames is the building block of narrative. It’s thought-in-action, and it’s why there’s no such thing as an intrinsically interesting or uninteresting subject. The story is not about what happened so much as what the narrator makes of what happened.

The monologue form is also where comedy comes in. Think of the standup monologue. The key to a comic voice is to write like you talk. Punctuate like you talk. Use grammar and speech rhythms the way you talk. Use idioms and foreign words that taste like your life. Comedy will rise off this language along with the garlic and lemon grass. 

We’ll talk about writing from a need to write and also from love of the process. In a sense, the most compelling pieces are love letters to something the narrator has been captivated by and the reader gets to listen in on.

We’ll talk about new forms of publishing literary work and new genres evolving from interactive platforms such as Substack. We’ll also talk about working in new literary forms that have partly arisen from new forms of distribution and creative control. What is a collage piece? What is hybrid writing? How do you know what to include in a collage and what to leave out? How do you know when to enter and exit—in this kind of writing and every other form? What is the satisfaction for the reader of a piece without a plot or a narrative arc? Does the reader supply a narrative arc, somehow, on their own? What does it mean to hear the music in a piece of writing as you’re developing it? If writing operates in some ways the way music does, what are techniques of amplification and deepening development with language? What’s the deal with repetition and echoes? We’ll tell you.

We’re looking forward to Five Things I’ve Learned about How to Write a Seductive Sentence. We think of our practice as an art lab, and we think of the workshops and classes we present as art labs as well—places where you can experiment and by experimenting hit upon an unplanned insight, or image, or a dramatic reversal of course.

We hope you’ll join us!

-Laurie Stone and Richard Toon