UCLA EXTENSION WRITING CLASSES SUMMER & FALL

FOR BEGINNING WRITERS AND/OR THOSE WHO WISH TO GATHER DRAFTS - I have some creative writing classes coming up at UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and I'm posting information here. Contact UCLA Extension's Writers' Program, 310-825-9415 for more information. I conduct my classes in a supportive atmosphere so the students can focus on learning. I know it's stressful to write and share your work, and critiquing/feedback is done in an encouraging positive way. After 6 weeks, many of my students are writing stories/personal essays. I'm also pasting below "Inspirational Quotes" which encouraged me when I was a beginning writer.

Summer Quarter - Starts 8/8/2007
The Essential Beginnings: An Introductory Creative Writing Workshop (Online) Many aspire to write creatively, but few know how to get started. For those who wish to write for personal or professional satisfaction, this supportive online workshop provides many fundamental techniques--from journal writing to imaginative in-class exercises--all geared to motivate and cultivate the beginning creative writer. Topics include writing from observation and experience, creating dynamic characters, developing points of view, and writing dialogue. By the course's completion, students should have a series of short sketches or a draft of a story. For technical requirements.


Fall Quarter: Starts 10/30/2007
The Writer's Sketchbook: Learning to Train Your Writer's Eye Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, it is important to train yourself to write in a "sensual" way--that is, to make your readers see, hear, feel, smell, taste, touch. Designed for beginning writers, as well as experienced ones who wish to infuse their writing with new power, this course sharpens your senses through the use of the writer's sketchbook. The course offers writing exercises that inspire you to create in a more vivid and more detailed way, and with a stronger voice. There is ample time for in-class exercises, allowing those with hectic schedules the opportunity to write or journal in a safe environment.

~~~~~~~~~INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

Fyodor Dostoevsky: “I can never control my material. Whenever I write a novel, I crowd it with a lot of separate stories and episodes; therefore the whole lacks proportion and harmony … how frightfully I have always suffered from it, for I have always been aware it was so.”

John Steinbeck re Grapes of Wrath: “The saddest thing is that this was the best I could do.”

Vladimir Nabokov re Lolita: “The book developed slowly with many interruptions and asides. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe. And now I was faced by the task of inventing America…Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft.”

Henry James: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?... It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time, it is an expression of character.”


About Gustave Flauvert, author of Madame Bovary: “In 1851, following a trip to Egypt, Palestine, and Greece, Flaubert penned the first draft of “The Temptations of St. Anthony.” Upon its completion, he sent for his two closest friends, Maxine du Camp, editor of the Revue de Paris, and Louis Bouilhet, a shy peasant poet. Flaubert told them that he was going to read to them from the manuscript of his newest work. For almost 4 days, reading aloud 8 hours a day, Flaubert went through “The Temptation.” He completed his reading on a midnight, and waited for the verdict. One of his listeners said bluntly, “We think you ought to throw it in the fire and not speak of it again.”


Melinda Jaeb, Editor: “Many of the stories I published were rejected the first time around. Sometimes rejections are due to tons of unnecessary words, poor dialogues and grammar, and undeveloped scenes. If there is potential, I make suggestions for a rewrite specifying cuts here and there. Then, after the writer has done a rewrite and sends it back, the piece is often acceptable. With the help of feedback, the story can evolve into its best possible form.”