Reading as a Writer:
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
2022: September 22 & 29, October 6 & 13
Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver, CO
Registration
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a writer needs to read—and read a lot—to hone their craft. And if you don’t recognize the first eight words of the previous sentence, you probably need to read more!
But it’s not just what we read or how many books we read, but HOW we read that matters most. The goal of this four-week course for fiction writers is to change the way we read forever. It’s essential for us to read every book like a writer: to question, to probe, to investigate. Once we learn how to do this we can treat all books like textbooks on writing, taught to you by your favorite authors.
Over four weeks, we’ll take a deep dive into a single novel, reading and re-reading it until we understand how it was constructed. We’ll mine the text for techniques that we can then apply to our own writing.
Our book is Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura. You’ll need to purchase the novel and bring it to our meetings, and although it is not necessary to read the entire novel before the first meeting, you will need to read it before our second.
- Week 1: An overview of Literary Analysis, the techniques for writerly reading
- Week 2: The book as a whole, including: motivation for writing and publishing, main themes, plotlines, structure, genre, marketing
- Week 3: Specific techniques: setting, scene mechanics, tense, voice, verbiage, symbolism, metaphor, sentiment coloring
- Week 4: The re-read: You present your findings and identify the techniques you plan to use (or avoid!) in your own writing.
Required Text:
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
