Last week, I talked to Kim Barnes, who teaches a novel-writing course. This week, I’m talking to students who’ve taken (or are about to take) that course at the University of Idaho, a program which regularly offers a year-long novel workshop capped at six students.

Did you need this course in order to write a novel? If it hadn’t been offered, or if you’d ended up at a different program, would you have written your novel anyway?

Anesa: The pages I produced for Novel Workshop became part of the third novel I’ve written (the previous two still unpublished but dreaming of resurrection). So it’s likely I would’ve written the novel I recently completed even without the support and structure of workshop. It also would probably have been a longer and more agonizing process.

Annie: I came to the program with a novel in mind, and a short start to it, but without this class I think it would have taken me 15 years to actually write it. Continue reading →