About this Workshop

"Who's got style?" Creating Perfect Sentences with Nina Schuyler

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Hey Forever Workshoppers,

Nina is here to give those of us who weren't paying attention when they taught sentence structure in undergrad a second chance, and holy hell is she qualified ( Stunning Sentences are her thing).

After completing her workshop, you’ll know how to create sentences that grip readers, control pacing, build tension, and do pretty much anything else you want them to, good for you!

Here’s how it’s gonna go:

All writers, whether in the fictive or nonfictive world, rely on the same building blocks—words. But what a writer does with these words distinguishes a bland, ordinary sentence from one that memorably and musically shines.

This workshop will focus on the sentence and all that it can do, not at the content level, but by its construction. You’ll learn to write sentences that create a feeling of anxiety, euphoria, calm, and abundance, and much more. You’ll learn that there is an entirely different way to write, and it’s by writing with the ear. 

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Workshop Takeaways

• You’ll learn about and write many different sentences with various syntax to create suspense, rhythm, and eloquence. 

• You’ll learn what syntactical structures mimic a real-time feeling vs. a mind that has organized the experience.

• You’ll fine-tune your ear, learning about rhythm and sounds, thereby creating musical sentences. 

• You’ll learn a special technique for creating original metaphors.

• You’ll learn the power of repetition and the different types of repetition that heighten the emotion in the sentence. 

• You’ll learn how one word can be exactly the best word for a sentence. 

This workshop begin’s on February 3, 2025. Paid subscribers will receive full access to this and all of our workshops for $10/mo

About The Instructor

Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. Her novel, Afterword, won the 2024 PenCraft Book of the Year in Fiction, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary, and the PenCraft Spring Seasonal Book Award for Literary and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal are bestsellers. Her short stories have been published by Zyzzyva, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fugue, Nashville Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and The Writing Salon.