For essayists, novelists, journalists, and all writers, research is one of the most powerful ways to engage your writing with the world. It gives you facts, inspiration, evidence, and other voices to converse and argue with. But working with research is also daunting, quickly overwhelming our organizational abilities and drowning out our creative vision. How can you work with so many sources and still be in control of the story?

In this lecture-based class, I’ll show you the strategies I use to organize, process, and write from research in book-length and shorter projects. We’ll cover working from books, ebooks, pdfs, interviews, and more. I’ll show you how to process research so key facts and ideas are easily accessible, how to digest and organize what you discover, and how to write from research so it sparks your creativity and helps you unlock new ideas of your own.

Course Takeaways:

Learn new strategies for processing, organizing, and writing from research.
Gain new frameworks for thinking about how research functions in your writing.
See how researching can be part of the brainstorming and idea-generating process.
Learn strategies for juggling multiple sources so you’re freed up to be more productive and creative.

From Research to Draft