Join me this September at the beautiful California Coast for masterclasses and workshops on novel writing.

Feedback vs. Instinct: Revising Without Losing Your Voice

Every writer with early readers eventually runs into conflicting notes, and no craft book tells you how to sort a note that's fixing your manuscript from one that's quietly editing away what made it yours. This class teaches you to weigh outside feedback against your own read of the story, so you can tell which advice to follow and which to set aside. You'll leave with a practical framework for handling feedback on this draft and every one after it.

Begins Tuesday, February 2nd, 2027
Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Tuesdays, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM ET
🌍 Class Times by Time Zone: Los Angeles (PST): 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM / Denver (MST): 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM / Chicago (CST): 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM / New York (EST): 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Who is this class for?

This online writing class is for novelists with a complete draft who are ready to revise but overwhelmed by conflicting feedback from early readers. Pitched at the intermediate level, this fiction workshop assumes you have pages in hand and a story you care about, not a blank page. You'll leave with a personalized revision plan for your manuscript and the structural diagnosis skills to tell which feedback to follow and which to set aside.

What to expect:

Most revision workshops teach structural technique and then leave you to sort out feedback on your own. This creative writing workshop treats those as a single problem, not two. Over four weeks, you'll learn to diagnose what your manuscript actually needs at the structural level: where pacing lags, where a scene isn't earning its place, where the real problems live and where the noise is. Alongside that, you'll build the judgment to weigh notes from early readers against your own instinct for the story, rather than defaulting to whatever the last reader said.

Each week pairs a specific craft lesson with guided practice applying it to your own pages. Week 1 puts the feedback you've already received under a diagnostic framework to find the two or three revision problems actually driving everything else. Week 2 moves into scene function and pacing, including how to decide when a reader's suggestion to cut a scene is right and when it isn't. Week 3 takes on the harder category of feedback, the kind that risks flattening your voice instead of fixing your structure. Week 4 turns the whole approach into a repeatable process you can run on this draft and every draft after it.

What are the writing goals?

In this course, students will produce a written structural diagnosis of their manuscript identifying its two to three core revision issues and where they live, and a personalized revision plan mapping out how to address them. Each student will submit up to 10 pages of their manuscript ahead of Week 2 and receive written instructor feedback addressing structural and scene-level revision, delivered before the start of Week 3. Students will also receive live, in-session guidance during Week 1 on their diagnostic work and during Week 3 on weighing feedback against their own instinct for the manuscript, with the instructor responding directly to what students bring to the discussion.