Doris Lessing said, “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

Sometimes an idea for a scene (or a story) will cross my mind and I’ll abandon it before I give myself a chance to engage with it. I’ll worry that the idea is not good enough, or too similar to something Anton Chekhov wrote, or that I don’t know enough about it, or that if I try it, I’ll make a fool of myself and fail.

For this one-day workshop, please come prepared to draft or revise a scene, maybe one that’s been lurking or plaguing you, one that you find challenging or daunting. We’ll begin the day by looking at some brief, important examples in literature where authors have mounted a successful approach to a difficult problem or scene or subject. Then we’ll use writing prompts to explore a few ideas before we move onto your scenes. We’ll use the bulk of our day to write, workshop, and engage with the pieces in progress, reading these pieces out loud, critiquing and discussing them.

Matthew Klam is the author of the novel, Who Is Rich?, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, nominated for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and Sam the Cat, winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection, and a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, First Fiction. He’s a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The O’ Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. He’s currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Stony Brook University.