In 2022, we’re excited to launch a new program – WLT Saturday Craft Seminars – featuring a presentation and conversation with an author who has just released a book on the craft of writing. Plus, everyone who buys a ticket will receive a signed copy of the book and access to the live event on Zoom.

In this interactive lecture, novelist Matt Bell details a practical and straightforward approach to writing fiction, focusing on specific tactics for generating a strong first draft of a novel, including creating compelling characters and structuring a fine-tuned plot, and for polishing your final manuscript to prepare it for submission and publication. Drawing from the strategies detailed in his craft book Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts, Bell will offer an abundance of strategies to help motivate you and shake up your drafting and your revisions, all focused on practical steps you can take to strengthen both your practice and your novel. Come curious and bring your questions!

From lauded writer and teacher Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done is encouraging and intensely practical, focusing always on specific rewriting tasks, techniques, and activities for every stage of the process. You won’t find bromides here about the “the writing Muse.” Instead, Bell breaks down the writing process in three sections. In the first, Bell shares a bounty of tactics, all meant to push you through the initial conception and get words on the page. The second focuses on reworking the narrative through outlining, modeling, and rewriting. The third and final section offers a layered approach to polishing through a checklist of operations, breaking the daunting project of final revisions into many small, achievable tasks.

Whether you are a first time novelist or a veteran writer, you will find an abundance of strategies here to help motivate you and shake up your revision process, allowing you to approach your work, day after day and month after month, with fresh eyes and sharp new tools.

If you can’t make the live event, don’t worry! This presentation will be recorded and made available for everyone who registers. 

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novels Appleseed (a New York TimesNotable Book of 2021), Scrapper (a Michigan Notable Book), and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.