Adair Lara | Writing Classes & Consultation
January 07, 2010
A new session (the only one this year until fall) of Adair Lara’s popular writing class has just been scheduled.
First-Person Writing That Sells with Adair Lara
Tuesday evenings in San Francisco March 30—May 25
“Half the people I know seem to have taken classes and workshops with San Francisco’s legendary writer and teacher Adair Lara. She is very savvy and smart and hugely entertaining. I admire her greatly.” – Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird
Where: 97 Scott Street, San Francisco (parking is easier than you think)
When: 6:45 pm to 9:45 10 Tuesdays: March 30—May 25
Cost: $675
Textbook: Naked, Drunk and Writing. It’s my book on writing essay and memoir, soon to be published by Random House, but available on this website—just click on the book in the sidebar.
The course: This class, which has launched hundreds of writers on successful careers, is for those interested in writing and selling essays or memoir. You will come out knowing how to make yourself write, how to nail a piece, how to sell it. I would say that 95% of my students have been published (for one thing, I make you send your work out). It is gratifying rare for anyone to drop, gratifying common for writers to take the course again and again. Also, you will have had a series of stimulating evenings and made new friends.
Each class begins with a new element, from angle, scene, revision, publishing, etc, with a short lecture and handouts, followed by readings and in-class exercises. The weekly assignments are designed to pull a lot of great pieces out of you and stretch your notions of what you can do, but you are always encouraged to substitute ideas or projects of your own. Each evening will include at least one 15-minute in-class writing exercises, many of them designed to give you a head start on the assignment. I will read five pieces from each writer, in addition to class readings, and am available for private conferences before class.
To apply: I will accept the first 12 qualified applicants who apply, plus a waiting list. I’ll need a $100 nonrefundable deposit to hold your place, the rest payable before or at first meeting. Once I receive the deposit, your place is guaranteed.
If you haven’t been in my class before, please email me writing sample—2 or 3 pages of your first-person writing, when you apply.
P.S. As soon as you sign up, put your writing schedule, as well as class times, on your calendar. Make it a priority, just for ten weeks out of your life.
See what happens.
About me:
I’ve worked in magazines–Executive editor, SF magazine; managing editor, San Francisco Focus; and in newspapers – columnist/reporter San Francisco Chronicle 1989-2004. I also have appeared in a variety of publications, including Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, Parenting, Glamour, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Working Mother, Departures, Westways, American Way, Via, Fitness, Good Housekeeping, More Magazine, etc. For testimonials on the class, check out the praise from students page.
December 16, 2009
WRITE WITH ADAIR LARA
“Half the people I know seem to have taken classes and workshops with San Francisco’s legendary writer and teacher Adair Lara. She is very savvy and smart and hugely entertaining. I admire her greatly.” – Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird
“Without her insightful guidance, Maisie Dobbs might be just a couple of chapters collecting dust in a drawer.” Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs series.
Petaluma Community Center, 320 No. McDowell Blvd., Petaluma
Saturday and Sunday, April 17 and 18, 2010
Workshop: 10:00 am to 3:00 pm
Tea and Muffins: 9:30 am to 10 am
Price: $195
To register: mcullen@comcast.net or Marlene 707-762-6279
The idea that we each have a distinct and compelling story to tell is the essence of memoir. Readers are hungry for accounts of triumph over personal crisis. How did you survive what happened, and what did you learn from it? In this workshop you’ll identify the tale you have to tell and how to tell it. You’ll also learn to think in terms of pivotal events, which become the scenes, how and when to let the background come in. We will learn to pay homage to the details.
Adair can help you outline the arc of your story (as opposed to just writing down everything that happened in the order it happened), show you how and when to write scene and when to use narration, what to put in, what to leave out, what to move around.
We’ll talk about the reflective voice—where you step back in some places and comment on what happened. We’ll cover the difference between fact (what happened) and truth (what you think about what happened). We’ll talk about agents, sample chapters, and publishing.
Whether you’re just beginning, or have already published, you will enjoy this time with the author of bestselling books such as Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, and The Granny Diaries. Award winning columnist for San Francisco Chronicle, author of ten books, Adair’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications.
May 17, 2002 was declared Adair Lara Day in San Francisco by proclamation of Mayor Willie Brown.
More information: www.thewritespot.us and www.adairlara.com
Former San Francisco Chronicle columnist and author Adair Lara has been teaching essay and memoir workshops for twenty years. Her students have been published in: The New York Times, The Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Self, Runner’s World, the San Francisco Chronicle, More Magazine, Vanity Fair, and many more.
Many of them have published books, including Janis Newman, The Russian Word for Snow, Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maisie Dobbs series and Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D.
In Adair’s workshop, you will learn:
- How to decide which stories to tell
- How to shape your story so that it makes a universal point
- How to use “ordinary” details and events to create extraordinary insights
- How to find the resonance in everyday events
- How to use the techniques of fiction (dialogue, characterization, scene-setting, suspense) to tell a true tale
- How to find the right markets for your essays
- How to pitch your personal essays to editors
Books by Adair Lara
Naked, Drunk and Writing (2009)
The Granny Diaries, Chronicle Books (2008)
Normal is Just a Setting on the Dryer, Chronicle Books (2003)
The Bigger the Sign, the Worse the Garage Sale, Chronicle Books (2007)
You Know You’re A Writer When, Chronicle Books (2007)
Oopsie! Ouchie!, Chronicle Books (2004)
Slowing Down in a Speeded-Up World, Redwheelweiser (2002)
Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, Broadway Books (2001)
The Best of Adair Lara, Scottwall Associates (1999)
At Adair’s House, Chronicle Books (1995)
Welcome to Earth, Mom, Chronicle Books (1992)
November 04, 2009
First Person Writing That Sells with Adair Lara
Saturday and Sunday, March 20-21
10 AM to 4:30PM
Starwae, Sonoma, California
This is an opportunity to draw on your own life experience and find out how to get your work published. Whether you’re just beginning, or have already published, you will enjoy this time with the author of bestselling books such as Hold Me Close, Let Me Go, The Granny Diaries, and her newest, Naked, Drunk, and Writing.
This course has launched hundreds of writers’ careers. You will learn about how to write, rewrite, and sell essays, humor and memoir. Spend a delightful weekend with other writers in the creative atmosphere at Starwae.
Classes are held in the studio-home of artists Janice Crow and John Curry. Delicious and healthy lunches and snacks are served outside in the garden, weather permitting.
You will learn:
* How to make yourself sit down and start writing
* How to organize your “story arc”
* Where to start…”where the trouble started, then, “Whump, something happened that changed your life.”
* How to write a scene when you need one to illustrate an important point
* How to write vivid detail that readers will love
* The difference between “factual account” and memoir
* Writing to honor your own life
Praise from students:
“Adair, you helped me land a piece in “O,” the Oprah magazine…”
Christina Bouris
“Without her insightful guidance “Maise Dobbs” might be just a couple chapters collecting dust in a drawer.”
Jacqueline Winspear, author of the Maise Dobbs series
Cost of workshop: $345 if you register before February 20th. $395 after.
Valentine special: $295 if you register by February 14 (Includes delicious lunch and snacks, not lodging).
Visa & MC accepted
Call Janice Crow 800 793-4792 to register, or email crow@starwae.com
September 11, 2009
Jon Carroll wrote a fabulous review of Naked, Drunk and Writing in the SF Chronicle a few days ago – here’s an excerpt:
“She’s studied writing, is what I’m trying to say. She has chosen apposite quotations and instructive anecdotes. She talks a lot about the students in her justly famous writing classes, and the good things they have gone on to do, and she quotes from their works – which, oddly enough, illustrate exactly the points that she’s trying to make.
So I do sincerely recommend this book, even though it was written by a friend of mine who knows more than I do – the very worst kind.”
Read the whole thing here.
August 16, 2009
Here’s the idea. On the desk is what appears to be a small cinder block… you know, grubby, off-white the color of old cottage cheese, two holes in the top. It’s
about 4” x 8” and maybe 10” high. But it’s not a cinder block at all. It’s a stack of peel-off pages. In the graphic on top, in the hole on the left side is “Writer’s Block” in big Each page has a writing prompt, then perhaps four blank lined pages after it:
Every Monday is a new assignment, weekends off.
Try this: Set an egg timer for 15 minutes Write as fast as you can anything that comes to mind. Use a kitchen timer. Writing often feels like a duty — I’m supposed to be writing! A timer means you have to write only until the bell rings.
My student, Cecilia Worth, described what it’s like for her to write in short timed bursts.
I do not stop for a minimum of 15 minutes. What I have found is that it will be weird and superficial for a while, and suddenly, like breaking through a long cloudy airplane run and seeing the green field below, I consciously put off the voice that tells me to stop because I have to go to the store, to phone, to lay off because the topic is garbage. Sort of like I’m waving it off, while writing furiously, saying, wait, wait, I just have to finish this. This is certainly not a new exercise, but it works every time for me. I believe that doing it impresses my subconscious that writing is indeed a priority. Once I did this every day at the same time for three months, at the end of which my piece on a patient with HIV was published in the Sunday New York Times magazine.
Steve martin: “Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.” His trick is to find a wonderful sentence in a novel, and copy it down. “Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don’t, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else’s work—unless you’re friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there’s no jail time.”
Try it.
Write for 15 minutes. Try to get image and detail into every sentence. You’ll be amazed at what comes up on your screen. Instead of saying, “My mother was untidy,” you’ll show us your mother in her laddered nylons, her shimmering slip with the lace coming off, the lipstick hastily slashed on.
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Today you will build images by adding appositives. “Apposition” means that one thing is put beside another; an appositive is a word or group of words that add detail to the original. The italics below show appositives added to the original sentence:
“I moved back to Kansas with its flat plains and harsh winters.”
“I gave away the household furnishings we’d used the two years we’d lived together before marriage, the towels from Goodwill in shades of 70s earth tones, the brown comforter with the burn hole that had become a tear, the odd-lot silverware with the bent fork tines and dull-edged knives.
“Her apartment was messy, tank tops hanging off the oven, pizza boxes stacked in the open bottom dresser drawer, a fuchsia bra wrapped around a lampshade and forgotten.”
“Within fifteen minutes a new scent began to waft its way through the kitchen, edging through the other, more pleasant odors like an impatient man pushing his way through a crowd.”
“He turned the car to the right, the plastic bobblehead Jesus on the dash nodding as if to say, ‘Hard call, son, but you made the right choice.’ ”
Tell a story of a room from your childhood. What did the room see? What were its secrets? Who spent time in this room? Who was not allowed in this room? What did the room feel like? Look like? What did you feel like when you were in this room? How did your body feel? Whom did the room belong to? What does the room remember?
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Write a page each on the themes of:
My mother’s house
My father’s hands
My father’s house
My mother’s hands
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Write a list of details from your childhood. (My own list would include milk delivered in glass bottles, metal ice cube trays with levers, cap guns, hula-hoops, linoleum flooring patterned to look like bricks, and clothespin guns.)
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Select a memory from your childhood (between ages 5 and 15, say). What did you feel at the time of the event? Go through the senses of touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste. Describe the colors you remember, and how the event made you feel. What impact has this memory had on you? Invent the details you don’t remember.
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Steinbeck said: “Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate.”
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To capture a character quickly: tell us three things they love, three things they hate. And say why.
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Find the points of change (turning points, learning points) in your life, and you will find your material: the time you realized you were gay, that your mother was not going to get better, that it was a mistake to move to the country, that you are not going through with the adoption. Or the day you threw your estranged husband’s nail gun into the bushes, and realized that the worst part of divorce for you was not how badly your spouse behaved, but how badly the process made you behave. The time your Volkswagen filled with twenty pairs of expensive shoes was stolen in Mexico, and to your surprise you were glad. The time you discovered you had a twin who died at birth, and decided to become a pediatrician.
Write about a time you changed.
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Write about the contents of your closet. Who did you buy that rabbit shearling fur coat for? And those tall, spiked black boots, the ones that were going to change your life? How many of the clothes fit you, or fit who you are now? Be specific.
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Tell a story in 200 words or less.
example:
My father was going to die. I knew that if I didn’t confront him with all these angry feelings I had that I would be stuck with them after he died. I confronted him at his house in Minneapolis, MN, told him how angry I was at him, and threw a Polaroid camera on the floor. He was amazed. Not mad — amazed that I felt that way. He had no idea. I felt much freer after that. AND THEN…he didn’t die. So we had around ten years after that in which we had a nice relationship with most of the baggage just dropped overboard…
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Make a huge deal of a very small incident, such as your broken shoelace***********************
Start a piece with this phrase: “And another thing about …”
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Fiddle with a piece of yours by adding three lines under every existing line, to force yourself deeper. I have my students do this exercise, especially those who seem to be able to race through a complex story in three pages.
Example:
I woke up. Something had brought me up from the dream about a giant squid wearing sunglasses. I listened, but heard only the backfire of a car passing on the street. My muddy pants and shirt lay in a heap on the rug next to the bed. I got dressed.
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Cluster ideas. First described by Gabriele Rico in Writing the Natural Way, clustering allows you to jot down ideas and make rapid connections between them. Write down whatever you’re working on in the center of a page, “scene at the lake,” or “falling down the stairs,” draw a circle around it, and then free-associate. Use this technique to generate new ideas rapidly. It works because you can range all over the place, making fast monkey-mind connections — the way we think.
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Write a piece about cleaning something out: a fridge, a drawer, a room, a garage. Show that you’re not just physically making space, that you’re also making mental space, letting go of an old self and making room for who you are now, and who you want to be.
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Write a piece that begins with a foreboding smell.
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Write a detailed map of your childhood neighborhood, the streets, houses, etc, putting in notes about incidents as you remember them. Orof the rooms in your childhood house. Write a story that surfaces during this exercise
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Write a four paragraph piece—very short
1. Paragraph 1: Focus on a moment from an early childhood , and render that moment with precise sensory detail.
2. Paragraph 2: Being with a phrase such as “For the next decade….” Which will push the writing toward summary (narrated story, as opposed to scene).
3. Paragraph 3: Begin with a line of dialogue and move into scene. This brings the focus back to an immediate moment and increases the intensity.
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Read a writer you admire for twenty minutes and then write for ten minutes in his style, on any topic
August 02, 2009
Here’s a tip from Katie Flynn on where to publish local essays:
Hi all–I’m not sure if we discussed this in class, but I just opened the Home and Garden Section of the West Contra Costa Times and saw they have a Real Life column that people can submit to–the paper says columns should be between 450 and 700 words and submissions should be sent to lwrenn@bayareanewsgroup.com, subject line “real life” and your name, city and phone number. Looks like it usually runs first-person essays on home, pets and gardening (gophers perhaps?). Anyway, it seems like it could be a good spot for a number of essays from class.
Just a thought.
Katie
August 01, 2009
My smart web guy, Phil Taylor-Parker has helped me modernize my creaky old website and –here it is, the new, editable-by-me, adairlara.com I should even start posting, like the rest of the world. Click around. Enjoy.
July 28, 2009
Naked, Drunk and Writing is a funny, anecdotal and highly useful guide to writing personal essays and memoirs. You can read an excerpt from the book or purchase it directly from Adair through PayPal.
