NEW WORKSHOP, COMING IN JAN 2025.
The new year is the perfect time to jumpstart your writing life and back on track with your manuscript! It’s also always easier to get writing done when you have people to be responsible to, deadlines, and active feedback. This is especially true if you are in a workshop with talented peers, taught by a charming genius. It’s not the worst thing to have deadlines to hold you accountable, to spur you to stay focused on the screen, so you can finally flesh out your protagonist and show all the complexities you’ve imagined for her.
This January workshop — tentatively starting around Jan 9-18 — will focus on description and using it proprerly, making sure your scenes accomplish what you need them to, and how these relate to the arc of your complex protagonist. There also will be time devoted to dialogue and how to use it right. We’ll have a fair amount of readings and breakdowns of novels.
In terms of the workshop component, this workshop will be an open shop: by which I mean, novels, short fiction, and nonfiction are all able to be workshopped. If there is time we may also have voting on potential subjects for lecture and discussion.
After two months, the hope is you’ll have a strong understanding of what openings of books must do, our class will have analyzed and examined the opening chapters and sections of a number of different types of books and novels. Most importantly, you will have workshopped your own project’s pages twice
Each workshop will have a ten student ceiling, so we have time to really focus on each participant, their voice, and their work. Figure two-three hours per session.
Ideally, our classes will be Saturdays, at 6pm est. But if that doesn’t work for everyone, we could do Thursday or Friday nights. I’ll cement details as the dates approach.
After your material gets workshopped, you and I will follow up with a private zoom session to discuss
Cost: $800 for 8 weeks (or two workshop sessions), which can be paid in installments.
I'm asking for a $50 deposit to reserve a spot. The week things start I’d probably need the first month’s admission fee.
email me for more info: cbock1999@gmail.com
Of course, all money is refundable in the event that not enough people sign up to have a class. (It is also possible that —depending on the sign-up situation and — both classes could be combined into one workshop. But we will jump off those bridges when we get to them.
Charles has spent more than a decade teaching fiction workshops at NYU, and also has taught in Columbia University’s MFA program, and has lectured on fiction at schools and retreats all over the world. Do you need help with your project?
Writing a book — whether a novel, memoir, short story collection, or non-fiction project — can be a lonely slong, one marked by not just being alone, but by wrestling with your aloneness. Much of writing involves trial and failure, venturing down uncertain hallways. Meanwhile, friends, spouses, lovers, kids, all want to know, when will you be done? It’s easy, natural even, to want results. Just finishing a first draft is a major accomplishment — the truth is, when I finish a first draft of something, I’m ready for the parade in my honor. But agents don’t want first drafts. Submit to an agent — let alone to a publisher — too quickly, your work gets a polite form letter.
In the same way that boxers usually have someone to run with them at five in the morning, thereby keeping them honest, in the same way that a personal trainer can help guide you through the best workout for your body, sometimes a book coach can be really helpful. Think of this as having a personal trainer for your writing life. This is a tether connecting you to questions of craft, someone to bounce ideas off, someone to share your writing life and process with, who will help with all these things.
My workshops and teaching process is designed to help you stay in the chair, and more, to advance your understanding of craft, and to help you learn how to live with writing your book, so you can write the best version of your book, the physical manuscript that is the closest incarnation of what is in your head. The book that you need to write. Writing beautiful sentences is one thing — and it is something I care a ton about — but how do you learn to live with the evolving, changing structure of a book? After you have that MFA but don’t have the structure of a workshop? When friends can only offer so much advice? When life’s commitments push at you, while on the page there are so many problems?
How do you keep your best habits, stay connected to what your vision can be, and forge on into the teeth of your doubts?
I teach over Zoom, with manuscripts and edits discussed via email. This allows writers everywhere access to top-notch instruction: how to work on the book’s structure as a regular part of the manuscript’s evolving life; how to organize time and your computer files; the classic structure of what goes into a story, and in particular what is demanded from the beginning, middle, and ends of stories.
I often apply my own journey to my instrution. When I teach a workshop, I include class exercises, handouts, discussions.
Pease join me and let me help you tackle these big questions. My goal is to help you move toward the answers that allow you to write and work at your best.
I am more than happy to provide references, and put you in touch with former students.
Any questions, interest, or if you would like to be kept informed about future classes and workshops: cbock1999@gmail.com
Paypal to @Cbockstar
Venmo to : @Charles-Bock-2
Open to all levels of experience.
If demand exists, there will be more writing boot camps, focusing on various structural and technical issues.
Similarly, if there is a demand, I will start (and teach) a workshop for people working on a manuscript (novel/ collection/ non-fiction project).
Current teaching calendar:
Dates to come.
About Charles: I am the author of the novels Beautiful Children, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Alice & Oliver (which got me interviewed byTerri Gross on Fresh Air). My fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Believer, Vice, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. I have received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, UCross, and the Vermont Studio Center. I am a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, teach writing workshops at NYU, have taught in the Columbia University MFA program for fiction, and have lectured about writing and craft all over the nation and world. I live with my daughter in Brooklyn.
