A really good story makes a campfire worth lighting, a cocktail party worth attending, and a reunion worth holding. A story can evoke tears and laughter. A good story can touch something familiar in each of us while showing us something new about our lives, our world, and ourselves.
Yet, when it comes to writing a story, we often become our own worst enemies. We tell readers what to think and feel. We throw in extraneous details just because we have them. We telegraph the ending. And we get stuck getting the story to work.
To address these bad storywriting habits, the Georgia Writers Museum (GWM) is presenting a six-week “Narrative Non-Fiction” writing course led by Jim Auchmutey, a past reporter and editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he twice was named the Cox newspaper chain’s Writer of the Year and won a James Beard Foundation award for his food writing.
The GWM course will be held via Zoom each Monday evening, Sept. 12 to Oct. 17, with each online session running 7-9 p.m. The cost will be $300 for the six-week program and student writers should visit Georgia Writers Museum at georgiawritersmuseum.org to register.
The class will offer a roundtable workshop format as opposed to a lecture. Each week the course will focus on a different aspect of non-fiction writing: scene and atmosphere, creating memorable characters, conflict and complication, theme and meaning, voice and style, and the line between fact and fiction.
Still a veteran journalist and author living in Atlanta, Auchmutey also has taught narrative non-fiction writing at the Decatur Writers Studio and lectured at Wofford College and Georgia State University.
His most recent book is Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America, named last year among “10 books all Georgians should read,” by the Georgia Center for the Book—as was his previous book, The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness, that also was a New York Times best seller.
- Contributed