Novel Writing with Lacey Dunham

Novel Writing Project

Online cohort led by Lacey Dunham

Tuesdays on Zoom | Starting January 26, 2027 | 6-9 p.m.

REGISTRATION OPENS NOV 10, 1 p.m. (for Loft Friends)

2027 Novel Writing Project with Lacey Dunham

Novel writing is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be lonely. The best way to complete a longer project is to commit to showing up for your writing and to find a supportive writing community. This year-long novel course is an opportunity to do both. 

The Online Novel Generator is a craft and workshop course that is intended to help you generate and/or revise a novel draft in a supportive and structured space. This course is for writers at all stages of the novel writing process, though it is best suited to those with a clear idea of what they want to work on over the year. Writers working in all genres and forms of the novel are encouraged to apply—literary, mystery/suspense, romance, speculative, or something in between. 

Across twelve months, we’ll write seriously, and we’ll attend rigorously to novel craft and revision through lessons on structure, setting, POV, character, and voice, among other elements. Alongside a group of peers and under the guidance of a published novelist and accomplished mentor, writers will dedicate a year to thinking deeply about their novel projects, from the nuts and bolts of writing to the revision processes to how to position your project for the marketplace. 

Along the way, we’ll establish goals and set deadlines. We’ll learn how to motivate ourselves through the sometimes daunting challenge of finishing a longer project, and we’ll discuss how to stay energized and focused even when the drafting gets messy. We’ll engage in exploratory and generative writing exercises to help us keep going to the end or to augment existing scene work, character work, and narrative movement. Together, we’ll also perform close reads of contemporary novels while thinking about our own work-in-progress. Finally, we’ll workshop our novel manuscripts together within a community of peers who are in the middle of the writing muck with us. 

Our time together will be divided into three phases: 
 

• Phase one is focused on exploration, building blocks, and understanding the core of our projects.
  We will read 2 recently published novels, studying what each author is doing on the page and how they are doing it, and adopting lessons learned from close-reads of these books into our own work. 
  
  Our in-class time will be geared toward helping each writer determine the best form for their novel and how to best articulate that on the page. We’ll bring particular focus to our individual writing processes and use that to establish focused and realistic writing goals for the year. Craft classes will be geared towards generating new pages outside of class, starting with novel beginnings, and writing towards the middle. 
  
  Each writer will have the opportunity to workshop twice. The first workshop will be the beginning pages of the writer’s novel. The second workshop will be up to 75 pages.
   
• Phase two is focused on assessing where to lean in and where to let go, with the goal of helping writers finish the draft and/or undertake meaningful revision on the developmental and the line level.
  In the second phase, we will continue to work on our own novel, by focusing on high-order matters such as the manipulation of time, scene/summary/exposition, tensions and relationships, narrative movement, and identifying the parts of your novel to advance the whole. We’ll bring specific attention to examining the muddle of the middle in our projects, a place where writers frequently lose steam when writing larger projects. We will also begin to discuss revision strategies for a large project. 
  
  In addition to our own writing, we will perform a close reading of 2 additional novels for inspiration and craft lessons. Each writer will have the opportunity to workshop up to 100 pages of their novel ahead of submitting the final project manuscript to the instructor. We will workshop one writer’s pages each week during this phase.

The deadline for the final manuscript is November 30. 
 

• Phase three is geared towards helping writers develop an understanding of the marketplace and publishing industry. 
  
  We will continue our novel writing and revision outside of class, continuing to move toward our individual project goals and complete manuscripts. In class, we will focus on developing our publishing industry toolkit, including writing the query letter, researching literary agents, and understanding the publishing landscape. We’ll learn first-hand from guests who are publishing industry professionals, including recent debut authors, seasoned authors, editors, agents, and others. 

Throughout the year, break periods will allow for more focused writing time. Each writer will also meet with the instructor for four one-on-one meetings: one before the course begins, two during the course, and one after the final project is turned in for an individual conference, tentatively to be scheduled in early January 2028. 

All incubator meetings are on Zoom for the entire year, so regardless of where you are, this course is accessible to you. 

Make this the year you transform that idea—your handful of pages, your notebook of jots, or your existing messy first draft—into a finished novel.