I am Brooke Lewis and I’ve been a professional writing instructor and editor for over a decade: as a Senior Language Lecturer in Expository Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts; as an editor of novels, essays, and memoirs; and as a creative writing teacher to adults and children.
I have an undergraduate degree in English from Cambridge University in the UK, and an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. Originally from London, I live in Brooklyn where I write novels and essays.
I want to help you write better, whatever that means for you, and I want you to have fun learning to do it.
Maybe you’re looking for inspiration or a new outlet and have no particular project in mind; maybe you want to get better at writing reports for work; maybe you’re ready to return to a draft of a novel or essay, or edit a single short story; maybe you’re going to start that memoir you’ve been thinking about for years.
Whatever your final product may turn out to be, I can help you to create it, because the process can be taught, learned, refined, and, most importantly, enjoyed.
We’re often told that the writing process is some mysterious and unquantifiable combination of magic, innate skill, inspiration, and aesthetic sensibility, but I’ve come to realize that nothing could be further from the truth. The process of creating a cohesive, coherent, and compelling piece of writing is one that can be broken down into its manageable (and pleasurable!) constituent parts with the help of a good teacher.
Having taught literally hundreds of first-year college students, assigning and grading thousands of essays and exercises with them, I know that there are concrete, specific ways of using reading and writing tasks to teach the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing in ways that allow writers of all levels to make tangible progress with their own work. I want to bring that process out of the undergraduate class requirement and into the so-called real world, where grown-ass adults can experience it willingly, with a group of like-minded individuals, and enjoy it.
I will teach you how to write more clearly; how to structure your writing; how to work with language to achieve the effects you want; how to communicate more clearly with your reader. And what’s more, it will be fun! We’ll read examples of good writing and discuss as a group how and why it works, from the small details to the larger structures. We’ll consider beginnings, middles, endings, and transitions; showing and telling; description and analysis; concrete and abstract.
We’ll discuss how to set a scene, write dialogue, combine backstory with action, and see the difference between story and plot. Alongside all this reading, we’ll be doing plenty of writing: you can expect small, timed exercises during our workshops which you can think of as sketches or experiments. They are places to try new things, take risks, fail gloriously, and discover what works for you and the story you’re trying to tell.
Then there will be longer assigned pieces to work on in your own time, to be discussed in a workshop during class, which I’ll guide so as to elicit and provide the most useful feedback I can. The purpose of the workshop is two-fold: to help you become a better reader of others’ work and in turn your own; and to receive feedback on your work and understand what a reader is getting from your writing.
Fall classes are enrolling now. There will be morning and evening options. The course is 8 weeks long and each class lasts 2 hours. You can find all the info here.