Fall workshop : begins Sept 28th, 2021
The 90-Day Rewrite is a Live-on-Zoom workshop with Alan Watt for novelists and memoirists seeking to complete their work for publication.
"I sit in Al's class and wonder why I went $64,000 into debt to get my MFA in fiction writing. This is a great class!"
Frank B. Wilderson III, Winner of the American Book Award for his memoir, Incognegro
THE PROCESS OF REVISION
The 90-Day Rewrite is a guide through the second pass of your manuscript. The workshop will take you through an analysis of your material beginning with a new outline, and then dive into an examination of the story, character, dialogue, and prose.
My goal as a teacher is to help you stay connected to your original impulse by asking the right questions. In the rewrite, it is often tempting to sterilize the complexity or contradictions in your work in order to make it "understandable" — but too often I've witnessed the dismemberment of fully alive first drafts. The 90-Day Rewrite is an opportunity to deepen your relationship to your material by gaining a clearer sense of what you set out to express.
The 90-Day Novel and The 90-Day Memoir processes were primarily designed as a right brain exercise to guide you to the completion of a first draft without going back and editing. The 90-Day Rewrite involves moving back and forth between the left and right brain — where you are editing and refining prose, while simultaneously generating new material and clarifying your theme.
The rewrite process is not a science, but an art, and like all art, the goal is to create an environment and work with a set of tools that allows the story to be fully revealed.
“I owe so much to Al Watt. It was in his workshop where my debut young adult novel, The Education of Margot Sanchez, came to life. He created such a safe and welcoming space that I was able to overcome my fears of failure and write freely. I still continue to incorporate what I’ve learned in his workshops in my daily practice.”
Lilliam Rivera, author of The Education of Margot Sanchez, Simon and Schuster, Nominated Best YA Fiction 2017
Prerequisite: The 90-Day Novel or The 90-Day Memoir workshops
Class Size: Limited to 16 writers
Class Length: 12 weeks. (This is an ongoing workshop. Writers are not expected to complete their rewrite in 12 weeks. Once a writer is in the workshop, they may continue for as many sessions as they wish. When they leave, their spot is given to the next writer on the waiting list.)
Class Days and Times: Tuesdays, 10:00 - 11:30 am PT
Where: Zoom
Price: $1,200/12-week session
Please note that there are no refunds for this workshop and we do not prorate for missed classes.
“Al Watt’s 90-Day Rewrite is the ultimate gift to writers—an incubator for the stories you want to bring to the page from a place of emotional truth and from your heart. I wish I’d known about Al when I wrote my first novel. His mastery of story fills in the missing pieces and he guides you to your best work.”
Sarah Lovett, NYTimes Bestselling Author for Blowback, Penguin Random House
about the workshop
We meet once a week in a LIVE Zoom call on Tuesdays from 10-11:30 am Pacific Time.
The workshop consists of four cohort groups with four writers in each group. Writers share their material with their fellow cohorts, and each week, one writer from each cohort reads their work in class. Alan Watt offers notes and open it up to discussion between members of the cohort.
Each Zoom workshop is recorded. You will receive a link to rewatch the workshop as often as you wish for up to three weeks.
Every morning a daily letter from The 90-Day Rewrite, lands in your inbox.
The letters were developed over the course of several years, and are a guide through the process of creating a compelling narrative.
Writers often comment on the synchronicity of the letters - on how they seem to meet you right where you are. While the letters focus on craft, they are also a response to the seemingly uncanny uniformity of experience shared by the many writers who have taken the journey before you.
The group forum is where we meet each day to share our daily experiences and hold ourselves accountable to our daily page count.
Over the course of 90 days we discover that we're not alone - the ups and downs that caused us to question whether or not we were really a writer, are, in fact, par for the course.
It's liberating to realize that our private struggles are universal, and that they often provide direct clues into the world of our characters.
I offer one-on-one story consultations where you can send me your three-page outline and I review it, make notes, and go over it with you in a one-hour consult to explore the most dynamic and compelling way to tell your story. There is an additional cost, and a limited number of spots for this service.
“Al Watt is a master teacher with a brilliant, intuitive understanding of story.”
Allen Zadoff, Author of The Unknown Assassin Series, Little Brown
“The 90-Day Rewrite gave me all the tools I needed to refine my first draft while staying true to the heart of my story. Al’s highly effective techniques stay with you as a writer and give you the confidence to finish your work and prepare it for publication.”
Jennifer Scott, International bestselling author of Lessons from Madame Chic, Simon and Schuster
your teacher Alan Watt
Alan is known as the Writer Whisperer.
He's an L.A. Times Bestselling novelist for Diamond Dogs, which won France’s Prix Printemps for best foreign novel of 2004.
He is the writer/director of the 2018 award-winning feature film, Interior Night, which won four Best Feature awards at U.S. film festivals in New York, Breckenridge, Cleveland and Catalina, as well as The Boston Film Festival’s Visionary Award.
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