Meg Wolitzer

Five Things I've Learned About

Writing about Family

If you have already purchased a ticket for this event, please use your email address to sign in now.

If you need a ticket, use the BUY TICKET button just below.

Please enter the email address with which you made your purchase.

Join New York Times–bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, and discover Five Things She’s Learned about the differences between real life families and the ones we invent – and how a writer might take experiences from life and transform them into fiction.

Online Event Details

  • 120 minutes

Price

  • Single-Class Ticket - $60.00

View the archive of my two-hour class and discover Five Things I’ve Learned about the differences between real life families and the ones we invent – and how a writer might take experiences from life and transform them into fiction.

Hello everybody, I’m Meg Wolitzer, and I’d like to invite you to my class, Five Things I’ve Learned About Writing About Family.

I’ve been writing and publishing novels since I graduated from college, and over the decades since then I don’t think I’ve written a single book that isn’t in some significant way about family.

I think the word family is pretty elastic. We understand it to mean the people we’re related to, or live with, or even sometimes the people we feel closest to. Writers talk a lot about character, and of course that’s a central topic. I’ve always felt, though, that the act of putting characters who are deeply connected to one another together on the page can give a writer an opportunity to create exciting and dynamic fiction.

If you’ve ever been in a family of some kind, then you know that the moments you spend with them can be peppered with interesting and unexpected bursts of emotion, tension, revelation, or even crisis.

We’ll be talking about all of that. How something might happen in real life, and how it might happen on the page. What’s different between real life families and the ones we invent. How a writer might take experiences from life and transform them into fiction.

And we’ll also be doing a couple of short exercises in advance, and I’ll have a chance to read some of them aloud during the class and respond to what you’ve written.

So whether you’re someone who wants to write, or who loves to read, or who thinks their own family sometimes feels a little bit like people in a short story or even a novel, I think you’ll find something here for you.

And I should add that I’m definitely going to leave time at the end to answer some of your pressing questions about craft, story, character, dialogue, humor, anything you like.

I’m really excited about this class, and I hope you can join me.

– Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times–bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Female Persuasion, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. She lives in New York City.

Writing And Reading

Discover inspiring classes and workshops from writers we admire.

Learn more, view personal video invitations to all sessions, and get special discounted pricing using the Five Things I’ve Learned Multi Pass.

Learn More

View On-Demand Now

Frequently Asked Questions

Your ticket entitles you to ongoing access to this class — even after the live session concludes.

If you purchase a ticket in time to join the class live, you can view the archive as soon as it’s posted, as often as you like. Look for an email with information about how to access the course archive within 48 hours of the end of the live class. Once you get it, you’ll have all the information you need to access it as you like across any and all devices you own.

If you purchase a ticket after the live class takes place, you can view the archive immediately, and you can return to it as frequently as you like

If you’d like a refund, we can happily credit the card you used to register for the session. Please send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com , and we’ll confirm receipt as soon as we see it (We don’t need your credit card info – just your email address and date of purchase.)

There are two things to know:

  • Unfortunately, we can only accept cancellations and refunds up to 48 hours before a scheduled session.
  • There is sure to be a lapse in time between the time we refund your order and the time a corresponding credit appears on your credit card statement. So that you’re not left waiting and wondering, we’ll contact you as soon as we’ve processed the credit in our system.

For reasons we hope you’ll understand – the biggest of them the fact that we make a point of compensating the folks who host Five Things I’ve Learned classes as quickly as we can – we can’t accommodate refunds for tickets purchased within 48 of the start of a scheduled live event. We can also accommodate refund requests for the purchase of an archived session only within 24 hours from the time of purchase.

If you’ve purchased a ticket for this online class and you find that for some reason you can’t make the live session, you have two choices:

  • The first: View the session archive. You can view the session archive as soon as it’s posted – or any time, as often as you like. We’ll make an archive of this class available within 48 hours of the live session, and we’ll send every ticket holder details on how they can view it. As a ticket holder, you’re able to view this full session archive any time– as often as you like.
  • The second: Request a refund. Just send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com, and we’ll help sort things out. Please keep in mind that we can only accommodate refund requests made more than 48 hours from the start of a live session.

We take data security and the need to protect your privacy as seriously as you do. That’s why we use Stripe to process your registration transaction. They take your credit card and secure your data – in fact we don’t even have access to your credit card number. Which is just the way we like it!

The information we do retain we protect carefully.

We’re committed to keeping personal information collected from those individuals who visit our website and make use of our online programming and services confidential, secure, and private. Our privacy policy ensures that we meet – and when we can – exceed most existing privacy standards.

Want to know more? Read the ExtendedSession Online Privacy Policy Agreement.

Still have a question? We’d be pleased to hear from you. Send a note to: pre.event@extendedsession.com.

The receipt you receive via email immediately after you register is all you need to confirm you’re set for the upcoming session.

About 48 hours before the live class is scheduled to begin, we’ll send you a personalized email confirming that everything’s on schedule and containing easy instructions for accessing the class.

We’ll send another reminder on the day of the class itself, and we’ll be available online just before the class begins to make sure you have no problems joining when the time is right.

Have a question in the meantime? We’d be pleased to hear from you. Send a note to: pre.event@extendedsession.com.

If you’ve not received confirmation of your purchase, it’s not because we haven’t sent it. In fact, we send an immediately confirmation to the email address you share with us to ensure that we can reach you with class details.

If you don’t receive a confirmation within 10 minutes or so making your purchase, please first check your “junk” or “promotions” email first — some people’s email programs group unfamiliar emails in these types of folders. The email date and time should match closely the time you purchased your ticket online.

If the confirmation email is not there, there’s a small possibility that your email address wasn’t entered as you intended when you registered. (You’d be surprised, but this happens.)

In any case, we want to make sure we can reach you. And we want to make sure you’re registered for the class you want. if you can’t find your confirmation email, please send us a note at pre.event@extendedsession.com. We’ll get back to you right away.

© 2024 All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy

Thanks for stopping by!

Find out first about every new class.

TicketsYou and a guest could win two tickets to the class of your choice.

Register now. We share two tickets every day, and an email newsletter with news about our latest upcoming classes once a week.



By sharing your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.