Tim Weed

Videos are now free on my YouTube channel for this 3-part writing craft series. I had a lot of fun teaching the series, and each 90 minute videos were always intended for later viewing. There is no cost or obligation to sample these, but if you like them, feel free to “like” them on YouTube and/or subscribe to my YouTube page. And don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like me to email you the accompanying handouts, which are very helpful in terms of following along.

This is a great time- investment for working writers looking to take your prose up to the next level, anyone wanting to jumpstart or return to a practice of creative writing, and really anyone interested in refining your skills in high-impact writing.

Here are more detailed descriptions for each seminar:

Sentence-Level Music I: The Core Qualities of Great Sentences

Most writers produce good sentences, but few produce consistently great ones. Members of this club tend to be authors of some notoriety; the purpose of this three-part virtual lesson is to nudge ourselves a bit closer to that level. In Part I we’ll break down a selection of great sentences in an attempt to discover what makes them effective. We’ll look at such topics as the importance of economy, specificity, and musicality, the uses of parallelism, and repetition for rhythmic emphasis. Brief writing exercises will help integrate our observations in the interest of endowing our own sentences with greater clarity, vividness, substance, and impact.

Sentence-Level Music II: Sentence-Level Suspense & Cumulative Syntax

In Part II of this three-part virtual lesson intended to increase your skill in sentence-level prose, we’ll begin with the surprisingly useful concept of the proposition as the basic building block of sentences. From there we’ll turn to building our skills in establishing sentence-level suspense, serial constructions, and the broadly underestimated power of cumulative syntax to capture the distilled meaning that is an essential characteristic of gripping prose. Brief writing exercises will help integrate our observations in the interest of harnessing the capabilities of the sentence to enrich and expand the range and musicality of our own writing.

Sentence-Level Music III: Making Sentences that Sing

Language is the paint; sentences are the brush strokes. The best painters are the ones who’ve become so good with the brush that they paint without thinking and in a style that can be none but their own. In the third installment of this three-part virtual lesson we’ll go beyond core principles to explore the sublime potentialities of the sentence. We’ll look at the ways in which great sentences can “sing the meaning of themselves,” and explore methods for varying sentence length to create mesmerizing rhythms and evoke specific emotions. A final writing exercise will help to integrate what we’ve learned across all three lessons, demonstrating a new facility with the art and music of sentence-writing.

Again, all three seminars are now free to view on YouTube! Contact me directly if you’d like the handouts that go with each.

Elated to be heading to Oaxaca, Mexico, from May 3 – 10. It’s research for a new novel, and for a museum trip focused on art, cuisine, and sacred medicine scheduled for April 2023 (open to anyone!). Other upcoming programs include a Newport MFA writing residency in Havana in January, 2023 (open to writers outside the Newport MFA community!), and several potential small-group cultural trips to Havana in 2023. If you’re interested in any of this, or in setting up a custom trip somewhere, please don’t hesitate to send me a note. And/or bookmark this page for dates and descriptions as they come in!

Very much enjoyed this conversation with my talented Newport MFA faculty colleague, novelist and memoirist Danielle Trussoni, which you can sample or enjoy in its entirety here. We discuss Danielle’s wildly entertaining new novel, The Ancestor, writing, genealogical research, escapist fiction in a time of pandemic, fiction vs memoir, and much more. Part of the Literary Cocktail Hour series sponsored by the Brattleboro Literary Festival. A conversation I won’t soon forget!

The video wiki has been published by the California technology company Ezvid Inc. It’s kind of a cool concept: “Ezvid Wiki evolved from the message board surrounding Ezvid For Windows, first released in 2010. In those years it has grown from a small user-generated forum into the largest and most comprehensive video wiki on the planet, providing useful, unbiased information and actionable guidance to hundreds of millions of users around the world, in thousands of knowledge categories.”

I’m honored that Will Poole’s Island has been selected to appear in the six minute video, which you can watch here. Check it out!