Craft Seminar: Starting and Finishing Novels with Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Craft Seminar: Starting and Finishing Novels with Maurice Carlos Ruffin
2 Sessions: Wednesdays, July 23 + 30
6:00-8:00pm ET
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, instructor at Randolph College Low-Res MFA program, author of three New York Times Editor's Choice books. This class is for beginning and intermediate writers.
Summer Novel Seminar. Are you trying to write a book? Looking for professional advice on how to improve your craft? Need a better understanding of how publishing works? In these two classes, we'll be covering all aspects of novel writing including finding a compelling topic, choosing the right protagonist, refining setting, focusing your research, revising and completing the project, finding an agent, and picking the best publisher for your book.
The classes will be primarily lecture, but will include question and answer sessions as well as light generative work. Each session will be approximately 90 minutes.
Workshop Highlights:
Attendees will learn how to write a novel.
Attendees will learn how to refine their concept.
Attendees will learn how to find an agent/editor.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s most recent book is The American Daughters (One World, 2024), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called "a vibrant picture of antebellum New Orleans." He is also the author of the story collection The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You (One World, 2021), which was a New York Times Editors' Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize. His first book, We Cast a Shadow (One World, 2019), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice and was longlisted for the 2021 DUBLIN Literary Award, the Center for Fiction Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Award for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Kenyon Review, and Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America.
