Join us for our live two-hour class and discover the Five Things We’ve Learned about the ways that living together has transformed our work and our writing.

Hello! We are Ann Hood and Michael Ruhlman, two writers married to each other. And we want to share with you Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing – from Living with Another Writer. Bonus: we each have five things, so in this session you’ll actually be getting ten things!

We’ve been married for nine years and writing professionally for almost forty years (Ann) and thirty years (Michael). But in these nine short years together, even after our decades of writing, we’ve learned all kinds of new things about the craft and the life of writers.

We’ve each had a rare view into the daily working of another writer. We´ve seen things most other writers don´t get to see—both the inner and outer views of another writer on an all but hourly basis. And we work and write differently as a result.

To our surprise and delight, we realized that in writing, as in life, there is always more to learn, and we’re eager to share what we’ve learned from each other with you.

When we got married, we were both fully immersed in our separate careers and lives as writers. Today, we live in a 411-square-foot apartment in Greenwich Village with our two cats and find ourselves writing literally next to each other every day. This was a big change from our former lives in which we lived in houses with more than one room, and we were both the only writers in those houses.

Writing side by side for nine years, sharing our work with each other, watching how we both do what we do has taught us a lot. As Joan Didion said of being married to writer John Gregory Dunne: “We are peers. We are co-workers. We are each other’s audience.” We are excited to tell you what we’ve learned about writing by living together, and to talk to you and answer your questions.

We’ll begin by sharing what we’ve learned about the importance of our writing routines. We both believe that routine is critical to the writing life, but we manage it in vastly different ways. Moreover, living together has changed the way we approach writing. We’ll describe how. By sharing our very different routines, we hope we will be able to help you discover yours. (And if you live in tight quarters with a partner, you might be curious how we manage not to take each other’s heads off.)

Naturally, the heart of our talk will be about the craft of writing, how we generate stories out of nothing more than our lived experiences. But we’ll also talk about the importance and power of revision. As Ann likes to remind us, “Revision isn’t cleaning up after the party. It is the party.”

We love this metaphor because it asks you to consider that preparing for a great dinner party is really like writing a first draft. Prepping the food, setting the table, arranging the flowers, polishing the wine glasses, setting up the bar, the canapés—it’s very much like that with a first draft: setting up the scenes and readying for the cast of characters you’ve invited to your story. Once you get that down, the party can begin, and who know how it will play out?

We’ll share our approaches for getting that first draft done, the hardest work of all. Then we’ll move through our various strategies for the party that follows, talk about strategies of revision. We’ll discuss everything from the actual mechanics of revising a manuscript (lap top or pen and paper? at a desk or in coffee shops? do we use text edit or print out successive copies to handwrite revisions?) to the broader more critical issues of revision when crafting creative narrative stories; building a compelling narrative arc, generating conflict (the engine of all stories), and creating compulsively watchable characters.

Importantly, we’ll also talk about how involved we get in each other’s drafts. Answer: very. We’ll talk about collaboration—something we believe benefits all writers. And we’ll discuss how living with another writer has consistently helped each of to generate ideas. (Michael, for instance, would never have written Young Adult fiction had he not been living with Ann.)

We’ll also share our thoughts about the ways that the act of writing changed our lives – something we don’t often see addressed from our fellow writers.

All these considerations have shaped how and what we write, and we be believe all aspiring writers can take away a treasure trove from our combined 70 years in the profession. Bring your questions—we love to talk about writing, and we love a conversation. We will be very much in conversation, and we invite you to add questions and comments of your own.

Please join us!

Michael and Ann