Coaching, Consultations, and Classes
We can all benefit from someone who can mirror and celebrate our work, help us understand our own voices and the nature of our particular projects, give us a sense of both immediate issues and larger questions that support us in taking our work to the next level.
If you want my help starting, deepening, or completing your novel or story/essay collection, please get in touch with me, tell me something about yourself, describe your project in a sentence or two (or more, if you’d like!), and include the first ten pages of your work. I’ll write you a short response, and if it seems like a good fit, we can set up a coaching session. I try to keep a couple of open slots so that if you’re interested in coaching you can get started fairly quickly.
I also provide responses for a few full manuscripts a year, mostly for my coaching clients and former students. If you are interested in learning more, please use the contact button below to get in touch with me and include a description of your project and the first ten pages. For full books, I ask that we start with at least one coaching session so that we can develop our ways of working together and clarify how we each understand your particular writing project and your writing as a whole.
coaching
Writing a book can be a long journey, and writers can save so much time when they have a guide and companion along the way. Some writers need just a single consultation or a few sessions of coaching, while others want steady help and accountability over a longer period. My response to your work will always include a consideration of your book's human and thematic aspects, in addition to the craft, and our method of working is interactive and respectful of your own wisdom and instincts.
Many of the writers I work with like to meet monthly, though we schedule each session at the end of the previous one to allow for flexibility, depending on your needs. Most often, during our sessions, we look closely at a piece of manuscript. Sometimes we have sessions that are more process-based or generative. Occasionally, we might look at and talk through outlines or plans.
When you send me a selection of the book, along with any questions or ideas you have, I’ll read it over and take notes, and then we have a Zoom or phone conversation in which we explore what you’re already doing beautifully (writers need to hear this!), where questions arise, and what can become stronger in the next draft. The writers I work with like this process because it’s a dialogue, addressing craft and process and human elements of the writing, and we can move fluidly into new areas for discussion depending on what you want and need.
If this sounds intriguing to you, please send me an email with a couple of paragraphs describing your project and the kind of help you're looking for, along with ten pages of the work itself. I’m interested in whatever you have to tell me about the characters and their situation and any issues you’re having with the book. This helps me give you the most useful response. You can write to me at sarah(at)sarahstoneauthor.com or use the button below to get to my contact page. Then I can give you more details about the process, including my rates. I look forward to hearing from you and am happy to answer any questions. It’s crucial for you to find a coach who’s a good match for you, so this initial stage is important.
classes
In addition to my one-on-one work with writers, I teach classes through the Stanford Continuing Studies Creative Writing Program. My upcoming live online (Zoom) novel-writing workshop for books in progress is now full and has a substantial waitlist, but I will be teaching another live online class in the summer, this one on voice (including style and POV).
Meanwhile, the novel classes have filled much more quickly than short-story classes this term, so there’s still a chance to get one of the last spots in Ron’s scene-writing class (novelists can also take this class). Here’s what he just wrote about it on Twitter (yes, I still seem to be there occasionally, and no, I’m not going to call it X): “My new Stanford Continuing Studies scene-writing class starts 4/3. We'll be workshopping stories and novel chapters and discussing stories by Grace Paley, Jhumpa Lahiri, Percival Everett, Lauren Groff, and others. We'll also have weekly in-class writing prompts.” You can see the course description and some of what previous students have said about his classes here and can register for the course here.