Writing Workshops

The Art of Revision: Using Emmanuel Carrère's Propulsive Honesty to Deepen Your Work with Lillian Fishman

$345

4 sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Tuesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT November 4 to November 25, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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Have you ever been filled with envy toward a book on a banal or familiar theme that you would never have realized could be so gripping? How do we write thoughtfully, honestly, and simply, yet fill our work with inexorable tension and drama? How do writers imbue the act of thinking with momentum?

This class is motivated by the belief that revision, rather than composition, is the work that achieves these results; it’s the long, wonderful, and rigorous stage in which you start to communicate—to make what is essentially private comprehensible and engaging. In revision, we learn to adopt a reader’s mindset and become attuned to the places where we’re still begging for the reader to be lenient or to do the work for us.

A wonderful model for how to write in a personal way while befriending the reader is Emmanuel Carrère. When asked by the Paris Review about his conversational, natural style, he admitted that he actually edits “a lot” in the pursuit of the balance between the conversational and the suspenseful. We’ll use his “conversational, natural,” but intimate style as a guide for how we can learn to invite the reader into our work.

Carrère is the French author of an eclectic range of books (“one masterpiece after another,” writes the New York Times magazine; “propulsive, original, free-ranging,” writes the New Yorker). Together we’ll practice his favorite generative exercise, and in revising our writing, we’ll learn how to balance intimacy and tension, tautness and flexibility, speed and slowness, and how to avoid hypocrisy and embrace shame. Carrère writes what he calls “nonfiction novels”; in this workshop, you can be interested in writing from experience or making things up, so long as you’re interested in telling a story in a conversational, intimate way.

Readings will be relatively short and excerpted from the following titles by Carrère: Yoga, Lives Other Than My Own, My Life as a Russian Novel, and 97,196 Words. Participants will come away with concrete tools for how to generate new work and how to thoughtfully revise their writing.

Course Outline:

Session 1: Brutal, shameless honesty
- Carrère makes a point of admitting his ugliest traits and the thoughts that he finds most disturbing. We’ll consider the various settings and modes he finds to do this and the effect they have on us. And before the next class, we’ll attempt a version of advice Carrère repeatedly cites from Ludwig Börne: “For three successive days force yourself to write, without denaturalizing or hypocrisy, everything that crosses your mind. Write what you think of yourself, your wives, Goethe, the Turkish war, the Last Judgment, your superiors, and you will be stupefied to see how many new thoughts have poured forth. This is what constitutes the art of becoming an original writer in three days.”
Session 2: Juxtaposition and balance
- What do we find we’re relating to that’s outside of us, even if it doesn’t make sense or feels boring or wrong? Carrère finds ways—bizarre and uncomfortable as these moments seem—to recognize himself in the murderer Jean-Claude Romand, to compare his lot to that of grieving parents and partners, and to intuit from odd inspirations his “extreme—deranged, even” candor. We’ll practice what we can consider including in our writing that has as yet seemed outside our purview.
Session 3: Seeing ourselves in relation to the world
- We’ll consider what we’ve written and look for a shape: where are we most raw? What seems most difficult to write about? Where are we attempting to look good for ourselves, and how can we prevent ourselves from showing off and from hiding? Where does the tension between our solitary, private selves and our relationships and sense of the world come to its head, and how can we distill and describe that apex?
Session 4: Rigorous editing
- We’ll focus on how to edit what we’ve written to create the maximum amount of tension, no matter the subject. Carrère often divulges and reveals himself, but his books are not tell-alls or confessional memoirs: his frankness is always in the service of a larger project or story. How can we recognize and cut away what is only interesting to us, and fill what remains in our writing with tension, momentum, and narrative coherence?

Level: Intermediate

This course will be held in person at The Center for Fiction.

Led by

Lillian Fishman

Lillian Fishman

Lillian Fishman’s novel, Acts of Service, was one of the New Yorker‘s Best Books of 2022. Her fiction has appeared lately in the New Yorker and Granta. Throughout 2024 she published an advice column on love and sex, “Higher Gossip,” for the philosophical magazine the Point.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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