Join City Lights for an evening of writers talking about writing
celebrating the publication of
Refuse To Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
By Matt Bell
published by Soho Press
Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell is a craft book approaching novel writing through the lens of revision and rewriting, meant to take the writer from the first page to final edits.
Refuse to Be Done is encouraging and intensely practical, focusing always on specific rewriting tasks, techniques, and activities for every stage of the process. You won’t find bromides here about the “the writing Muse.” Instead, Bell breaks down the writing process in three sections, one for each of the three major stages of drafting. In the first section, Bell shares a bounty of tactics, all meant to push the writer through the initial conception and get words on the page. The second section, Bell explains, is focused on reworking the narrative through outlining, modeling, and rewriting. The third and final section offers a layered approach to polishing through a checklist of operations meant to be applied to a manuscript one at a time, breaking the daunting project of final revisions into many small, achievable tasks.
This is a book to give to an aspiring writer, to assign for course adoption, and even to interest the general reader. While geared for the novel, many of its tips are applicable to all types of creative writing, fiction and nonfiction.
About the participants:
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novels Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book of 2021), Scrapper (a Michigan Notable Book), and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Kirstin Chen is the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners and Bury What We Cannot Take. Her new novel, Counterfeit, is forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2022. She has received fellowships and awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently lives in San Francisco.
Jac Jemc is the author of False Bingo, The Grip of It, My Only Wife, and A Different Bed Every Time. My Only Wife was a finalist for the 2013 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, and her story collection False Bingo won the Chicago Review of Books Award for fiction, was a Lambda Award finalist, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. Jemc has been the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Professional Development Grants and currently teaches creative writing at UC San Diego.
This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation