Sometimes the best way to move ahead with one's work is personal consultation with an author and teacher. For one thing, it saves you all sorts of money. Going to graduate-level workshopping programs means paying the course term, in return for which you are usually asked to spend hours and hours looking over beginners' work so that you can make either shallow or not so shallow comment on it. One gets minimal attention from most c.w. instructors, some of whose work you are doing for them. Yet it is you, not they, who paid between $1500 and $4,000 to take the course. It is awkward to complain, too, because then you are someone called a "complainer" and who will write a blurb for a complainer? I think that if creative-writing workshops were ever a fair buy, they generally are not fair now. There are, of course, marvellous, generous exceptions.
Writers send me a manuscript. I read it and make comments all through on both overall themes and textual points. Then we schedule a telephone conference, or when writers prefer it, a personal conference in St Paul, Minnesota. We talk everything over. Then I mail back to writers the copy of their work they originally sent me, because it now has all my notes to myself in its margins. These act as reminders to the authors. Sometimes I have made separate sheets of notes to myself about their work. When I have, I send those, too.
Manuscripts of 0 to about 50 pages at most: $200, which covers a one-hour consultation and all of my reading time.
Manuscripts of about 300 pages: $1000, which covers the two-fold kind of effort that a full-length book requireswhich is to say over-all structural aspects in addition to the inch-by-inch textual critiquing which goes with literature of feeling. The author may ask for, if wanted, up to 5 hours' consulting on a work of such enterprise.
Manuscripts of 300-to-500 pages $1500.
Free to authors: After we have done our consulting, and you are looking over your returned manuscript, and you find you can't recall all we talked about, or worse, you find my marginal notes appallingly unclear, you e-mail me and ask for clarity. Such correspondence should have to do only with the work we looked at, not new work. People make use of this offer. It's wonderful, actually. There is no sense to their paying more for this part of the offering.
We use e-mail only for letters, not for literature. All manuscripts must come by the U.S. Snail, and be accompanied up front by a check for the total fee.
Please e-mail me or telephone (651-699-5427) with any questions you have.