Creative Manuscript I - Nonfiction

Catalog description

In this course, the student is assigned a faculty member as a one-on-one mentor. The mentor will begin the semester by reading the current draft of the full creative manuscript, up to 300 pages in length. After the mentor has read the manuscript, the student and mentor will conduct a conference in person, or by phone if an in-person conference isn’t viable. If possible, the mentor and student should take advantage of a residency to discuss the manuscript face-to-face. During the initial conference, the mentor and student discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript and decide on goals for the semester ahead. Every kind of revision and rewriting is on the table. That is, the mentor and student might decide that an entire manuscript should be scrapped and started over. On the other side of the spectrum, they might decide on a course of line-level revisions. From that point forward the student submits 30 pages of creative manuscript every five weeks, for a total of four additional submissions. The mentor’s responses to these submissions should center on marginalia and phone conferences, with thorough line-by-line edits and comments responding to passages. The mentor’s responses should be like those of an excellent, devoted, unusually hands-on book editor. There should be a great deal of conversation; the responses to the packets should not be one-way instruction. This reflects the fact that the student has already completed an MFA program and is a somewhat experienced writer, in all likelihood preparing the manuscript for submission to literary agents.