In this 6-week intensive class, Suzy Vitello will identify your writing strengths and help you capitalize on them. 100% Online, Available Everywhere!
Your Instructor: Suzy Vitello
Where: Online — Available everywhere!
When: This class is not currently enrolling. To be notified when it is offered again, Click Here
Enrollment: 16 Students Maximum
Price: $397
Class Description
To lead this powerful six-week intensive class, Portland's "best kept secret" of the writing stars, Suzy Vitello, will give you a diagnostic assignment, followed by a "readout" that analyzes your writing strengths in terms of six major areas: The Hook, Plot Promise, Structure, Character Voice & Introduction, POV/tense choices, and Language/ Mechanics. Each student writer will gain a concrete understanding of what he or she does best (their "differentiator"), and will receive specific directions on what to do to capitalize on those strengths in service to hooking an agent or publisher.
What This Class Covers
Weekly Lecture Highlights:
Week 1: Find your sweet spot (a personalized approach).
Week 2: Launch your narrative with authority.
Week 3: Show-don’t-tell strategies you’ve never heard.
Week 4: Hook-up like a pro (or at least like a NYT bestseller).
Week 5: Is your opening working? The litmus test.
Week 6: How to get an agent to request a “full.”
Expanded Weekly Outline:
Week 1: Come Here Often?
The inaugural lecture/assignment will focus on your seductive strengths RIGHT NOW. As part of the kickoff, you will be invited to send your first three pages to Suzy Vitello, who will analyse in terms of both strengths and weaknesses and give it to you straight up, rating your pages like an agent/editor/reader will. You will be encouraged to go forth based on your particular strengths, and as for the weaknesses? Each week you’ll get a new tool for your belt.
Week 2: Join the Mile High Club
The first paragraphs of a manuscript need to do more than “hook the reader.” They need to serve as the launch for the entire trip. As writers and pilots, this week we’re going to inspect our engines: the turbine, compressor, and combustion chamber. Whether we’re flying a propjet, or a lumbering airbus, we should have the same agenda: get enough speed and fuel to take off and soar for as long as it takes to reach our destination.
Week 3: Now That I’ve Got You Where I Want You
We know it when we read it, don’t we? A successful scene that sucks you in? Is it all smoke and mirrors? Yes. Yes, it is. Learn how to flex your narrative muscle by playing with distance, objects, voice and tone.
Week 4: The Hookup
This week we’ll dive into the mechanics of the all-important hook. We’ll look at examples from the work of my high-powered, best-selling writing group and then experiment on our own work, in a granular, sentence-to-sentence way.
Week 5: Does This Paragraph Make Me Look Fat?
You’ve written, revised, and revised again. Do your opening chapters work? Are they seductive enough? Now is the time to invite new eyes to see. This week you’ll invite a virgin Beta reader to opine on your seduction and give him some specific things to consider in order to inform your next revision. We will also find a time that works for all or most of your class for an hour-long group conference call.
Week 6: Pour Me a Double
Whether you want to attract the attention of an agent, a publisher, or your final readers, the game is the same. Get them to turn the page! We’ll return to the initial “readout” in this final week, and look at the gains you’ve made, as well as recommendations for follow-up attention. You’ll get a personalized Rx from the den mom for the road to success!
Goals Of This Class
- Understand and leverage your strengths as a writer: find your sweet spot and exploit it
- Find the right opening for your book -- one that bursts with energy and promise
- Understand the power in cutting the typical “throat clearing” out of your opening, and get moving from the first sentence
- Produce three chapters (or up to 45 pages) that will get you a request for a full manuscript
About Your Instructor
SUZY VITELLO has been teaching creative writing and facilitating workshops for more than 15 years. As the den mother to Portland’s “hottest writing... [more info]
Testimonials and Acclaim
This was it, meaning a class focused on the novel. Most of the classes focus on short stories, as a lot of them should. But yeah it was great to have this focus on the novel, or the beginnings of a novel. Something else I should add while we're on the subject of classes at LitReactor. I think it's the greatest experience an emerging writer can have.
--Nathan Pettigrew
Seductive Beginnings is an insightful and inspiring class. I shared work with a skilled set of writers and received feedback that helped me solve structural issues in the piece I submitted. Suzy Vitello has an editorial eye that sees into the heart of a story. And beyond that, she’s an all-around, great teacher and reader.
--Eli Fogel
Suzy clarifies how to make a solid start, from the first sentence. From there, you build on that, gaining confidence that your precision earned in the first three chapters will be a firm foundation for everything you're going to write to continue the story. The detail teased out of your writing helps you see where you're going with the work. Brilliant stuff.
--Johnny Parry
“What I love most about reading Suzy Vitello’s stories is that I feel like I am inside the world of her characters so deeply that I start talking aloud to them. They are my friends, my sisters, my mother, my lovers, my husbands and ex-husbands and daughters and sons. I could stay inside her stories and not come out.”
- Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Dora: A Head Case
“Suzy Vitello Soulé writes like the sweet, smart, sassy person I aspire to be. Her stories are full of mystery and longing and the endless and varied complexities of ten thousand kinds of love. She’s never written a page that didn’t make me ache for another one. Her work is sheer must-gobble-it-up.”
- Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Torch
“Suzy Vitello is one of the smartest writers I know. She’s taught me probably 40 percent of everything I know about writing fiction. I still write mainly to please her.”
- Chelsea Cain, NYT bestselling thriller author
Suzy Vitello's weekly workshop group in Portland,
including Chuck Palahniuk and Lidia Yuknavitch.