Funny on a Sentence Level: A Seminar

In this three-hour seminar, we'll turn regular sentences into jokes using comedic and stylistic tools. To write funny, you don't need to write about something that's funny or someone who is funny — because you can write jokes if you can use a dictionary.

Comedy writing isn't writing joke after joke. It's a series of syntactical decisions and rearranging sentences until they end on a punch line. It's also learning and practicing comedic tools like wordplay, profanity, absurdity, contrast, contradiction, and neologism, alongside style tools like diction and syntax, imagery and figurative language, rhythm and punctuation, voice and tone. Humor writing — and its tools and hacks — is a skill, not an innate talent, so we'll practice to perfect it.

October 11th (Sunday)

2-5pm ET

Online and recorded for the memories

Writing Vulnerably: A Seminar

It can feel awkward to write about your nightmare thoughts and gross feelings. This is writing vulnerably. Being vulnerable in your writing can feel uncertain, unstable, exposed, outside your comfort zone. It may seem stupid and embarrass you, and you may regret doing it. But to write well or at all, you must love looking like an idiot. If you worry about freaking people out, then you're writing correctly.

No topic or experience is too dark or too sad to write your way into and out of.

This two-hour creative writing seminar is part lecture on what, when, where, why, and how to write vulnerably without selling yourself out, and part generative writing session.

Take this online writing class if you want to see how good your writing can get when you don't stop yourself. To quote the youth: "To be cringe is to be free."

December 6th (Sunday)

3:30-5:30pm ET

Online and recorded for the memories