So you wrote a short story. Now what?
How do you take that draft of half-formed ideas and turn it into a well-crafted story? What do you do with feedback from others that’s contradictory and overwhelming? How can you put your voice on a page when you don’t even know what that is?
Revision can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be playful and empowering.
Our revision course, created and taught by Sonal Champsee, will help you find the magic in your own work.
I am thrilled to offer Sonal Champsee’s course. Sonal and I have been working together since I started this school.
She’s a gifted writer and a compassionate, clear-eyed teacher, with a deep knowledge of craft and respect for experimentation. Her generosity and honesty make her a remarkable mentor, especially when you’re going into the uncertain wilderness of revision!
xo,
Revision has never been easy for me. It’s still isn’t. I still wonder if I can somehow get away with writing just one draft that’s so good that I never have to revise it, because that would save so much time and writing effort. This never happens.
For some writers, revision sometimes feels really negative, because it feels like a process of fixing everything you failed to do in the first draft. Not fun. But the thing is, all stories need revision. Does that mean every first draft is a failure? Of course not. A first draft is just a beginning, a starting point for the gradually exploring the story deeper and deeper until you’ve figured out what the story is for you, and how to tell it.
For other writers, revision is actually the fun part, and they can play and change things and rewrite forever. These writers haven’t quite figured out what their story is really about yet, or else, aren’t ready to commit to that. Maybe, they haven’t yet considered where their own voice comes into this.
I think what trips a lot of writers up is that they are trying to figure out how to make their stories good. But good is subjective. There are a thousand ways to make a story good. How, instead, do you make your story both good and your unique voice on the page?
This is a ten-week course starting at the beginning of April. Class is in session Monday to Wednesday, with a weekly Zoom discussion. Students are expected to conduct some exercises in class and others as homework between sessions. Active, engaged participation is required.
We will focus on short story or short non-fiction narrative. Please no excerpts from longer works unless they can stand entirely alone—while knowledge from this class is applicable to long forms, examining the structure of an excerpt within the context of a longer work is outside the scope.
Students will learn how to give and use feedback better amongst themselves, with guidance and facilitation from the instructor.
You will need:
Each week, you will work on exercises both in-class and on your own to help you identify your voice in your story, strengthen your understanding of craft and become a braver writer. You’ll join in discussion with the class and examine both your own work and published work to put everything you learn into immediate practice. The course culminates in a structured workshop to help you write a revised version of your story.
How do you turn your first draft into a well-crafted story? What do you do with overwhelming and contradictory feedback? How can you use your voice, when you don’t know what that is? Created and led by Sonal Champsee, this program teaches you how to strengthen your understanding of craft, become a braver writer, and write a new version of your story.
Revise your short story. Registration now open. Course runs July 11 to Sept 30, 2022.
*
“Sonal’s class helped to take the fear out of revision, while at the same time providing useful tools to assess my work.
Sonal was a joy to learn with. Her easy going and self-reflective style, completely free of ego, made me able to be more open about my own work.”
—Vicky Jones—
How do you turn your first draft into a well-crafted story? What do you do with overwhelming and contradictory feedback? How can you use your voice, when you don’t know what that is? Created and led by Sonal Champsee, this program teaches you how to strengthen your understanding of craft, become a braver writer, and write a new version of your story.
Revise your short story. Registration now open. Course runs July 11 to Sept 30, 2022.
*
“Before Sonal’s course, I had an uneasy relationship with revision. I would workshop my short stories, get some feedback and then feel stuck — what should I do next? Sonal’s Revision Course helped guide me through those next steps by helping me find my intention with my stories and amplify them. I have a better handle on structure and can better understand which feedback helps me revise my work and which doesn’t. I’d highly recommend this course to any writer struggling to revise their work in a meaningful way.”
—Kelly Pedro—
How do you turn your first draft into a well-crafted story? What do you do with overwhelming and contradictory feedback? How can you use your voice, when you don’t know what that is? Created and led by Sonal Champsee, this program teaches you how to strengthen your understanding of craft, become a braver writer, and write a new version of your story.
Revise your short story. Registration now open. Course runs July 11 to Sept 30, 2022.
*
“Sonal’s feedback was incredible. She is so insightful — can cut right through a sentence or a story and really see what is happening with it. I feel like I learned so much from her and have become a much more confident writer thanks to her. Sonal’s clear advice and mentorship helped me gain the confidence to, finally, call myself a writer.”
—Kirti Bhadresa—
Graduates of the Story Intensive, or who have completed the Story Course, who have a short story or short piece of narrative non-fiction that they don’t know what to do with. Maybe you’ve received some feedback that you have no idea what to do with. Maybe you’ve had no feedback and are lost about what to do next. Maybe you’ve changed a few things and still feel like you have no idea what you’re doing with the story.
Teaching revision is tricky. What I didn’t want to do was teach a formula—because there is no single formula. Every story, every writer, has its own unique path to its final form, and that path is not usually a straight line. There might be a lot of common things to look at during revision, but the best stories are the ones that are a true expression of the writer’s heart and soul on the page, and there isn’t a single formula for that.
Instead, I want to teach you a mindset for revision. In addition to the lessons and exercises, you will have small group coaching calls with me, to talk through the revision process, discuss craft, and help you figure out a new way to think about revision.
No. But we will have a mini workshop where you will be paired up with 1-2 other writers for a deeper, more focused conversation on your story, and what to do with it next.
A traditional writing workshop involves a group of 6-12 writers, who read one writer’s story a week and then give their feedback. Through this process, the writer typically doesn’t speak, or at least, doesn’t speak until the very end.
At its best, a workshop is an exciting, invigorating conversation about your work and how to make it better, but at its worst, it’s an avalanche of conflicting opinions about everything that is wrong with your story, from people who may or may not get your story. That can be overwhelming, and leave you more lost than when you started.
And sometimes, it’s a lot of silence. When writers don’t know how to give good feedback that takes your intentions for the story into consideration, the result is a lot of nothing. Or, a lot of compliments, which are nice to hear, but don’t get you anywhere.
Our work with revision is going to help you give better feedback, and also help you get the most from other people’s feedback.
Writers can spend lifetimes learning about craft. There’s always more to explore. As Hemingway (terrible guy, great quotes) said, “We are all apprentices in a craft that has no masters.”
Truthfully, you don’t need to know everything about craft to write a well-crafted story. There are some basics that are necessary. But for the rest, when your story starts pushing up against the boundaries of your own understanding of craft, that’s the time to start exploring more craft.
That said, we’re still going to spend time learning about writing craft, particularly structure, but if you’ve taken the Story Course or the Story Intensive, you know enough to get started.
Structure can seem like a lot of rules, and the danger of structure is that it can leave you feeling like your story must conform to a particular shape, no matter how ill-fitting. But structure is important—we need to understand how the bones fit together before we can figure out if our story is a human or a giraffe or a dinosaur.
We’re going to learn about structure in a way that frees us from having to follow the rules, but also helps us understand what those rules are and how they work, and how to make them work for us.
A novel? Excellent! But unfortunately, to look at the structure of an excerpt without looking at the larger structure of the novel is a bit unfair to the novel. For this course, we need standalone narratives—short stories, memoirs, etc.
Everything we do in this class is applicable to revising a novel, but if you want more help with novel revision specifically, talk to Heidi. She’s terrific.
On the first day, the online classroom will open. This is where you will look at the lessons, guide you through revision exercises, learn about and post homework assignments, and most importantly, participate in the online discussion forum—much like the Story Intensive.
When class begins, Sonal will reach out to you to settle on some times for weekly Zoom meetings, based on everyone’s availability. This is where we will talk through the lesson, answer questions, and discuss writing and craft in general.
If you are unable to attend the Zoom meeting, it will be recorded and posted for you to view, and you can post your additional thoughts and questions on the discussion forum.
How do you turn your first draft into a well-crafted story? What do you do with overwhelming and contradictory feedback? How can you use your voice, when you don’t know what that is? Created and led by Sonal Champsee, this program teaches you how to strengthen your understanding of craft, become a braver writer, and write a new version of your story.
Revise your short story. Registration now open. Course runs July 11 to Sept 30, 2022.
*
“Before the class, revision made me feel confusion, uncertainty, and disorientation. After the class, I still felt those things, haha! BUT, I was able to look at those feelings as a normal part of the process. If I was feeling those things, then I was on the right track, even. I thought I would get tools or steps on how to revise. And, the course does do that but more importantly, it gave me a radical new view of what revision is and what it can do for my story.
Sonal is generous with her wisdom and knowledge. I also felt empowered by her acknowledgement of writing in a society that is still predominantly patriarchal and white. It reminded me that my words, published or not, matter.”
—Nancy Sulaiman—
How do you turn your first draft into a well-crafted story? What do you do with overwhelming and contradictory feedback? How can you use your voice, when you don’t know what that is? Created and led by Sonal Champsee, this program teaches you how to strengthen your understanding of craft, become a braver writer, and write a new version of your story.
Revise your short story. Registration now open. Course runs July 11 to Sept 30, 2022.
*
“If you struggle with revising your work, take the leap into six weeks of learning why you (and most writers) have a difficult time revising, editing and sticking at it through to a final version. Under Sonal's guidance, I began to think differently about the process of revision … Revision is challenging? Yes. Exciting? DEFINITELY!
Sonal is an excellent guide for any writer learning the art of revision. Her style is calm, friendly, with a sense of humour. Her personal experiences within her own university degrees, writing practice, taking and teaching workshops plus sharing her drafts of published works were relayed to course participants in a way that helped me to see the relevance of what we were trying to accomplish in the course. Her style kept me feeling that I was in a safe and caring environment, and as a result, she created a cohesive class feeling that I appreciated very much.”
—Anne Parkinson—
Sonal Champsee’s short fiction and essays have been published in anthologies and magazines such as The New Quarterly, Ricepaper, and Today’s Parent. Her novel-in-progress, Everyone Can’t Be Wrong, was shortlisted for the 2022 HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. She writes the advice column Writer Therapy on Substack, has had a play produced in Seattle, and is currently the lead instructor for the Sarah Selecky’s Writing School. Sonal lives in Toronto and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.
