Write the literary novel you were born to write — and put it in readers' hands

If you're here, I suspect you've been carrying a novel for a while. Maybe you've written pages — dozens, hundreds — and stalled. Maybe you've read so deeply and so widely that your own ambitions feel almost embarrassingly large. Maybe you've told yourself that the "commercial" path and the literary one are incompatible, and that choosing one means betraying the other. I know that feeling. It kept me from finishing my own work for longer than I'd like to admit.

What I eventually understood — through years of reading, writing, teaching, and watching the publishing world change around all of us — is that the divide between literary seriousness and practical success is largely a myth we've inherited from a very particular moment in twentieth-century literary culture. The writers I most admire, from the canonical to the contemporary, were not indifferent to their readers. They were obsessed with them. They just pursued that reader through the quality of the work itself, through every sentence earned and every structural decision made with intention. That is what this school tries to teach.

I built Write & Publish Well because I couldn't find a program that treated both halves of the problem with equal seriousness. There are MFA seminars that will discuss Woolf and Sebald with genuine rigor and then leave you with no idea how to get your finished manuscript into anyone's hands. And there are self-publishing courses that will walk you through KDP dashboards in granular detail without ever asking whether your book is actually good. You deserve both. You need both.

So here is what we do together: we start with the books that last — not as objects of reverence but as working documents, texts you can take apart and learn from. We build your voice, your structure, your characters, and your revision practice on that foundation. And then, when you have a finished manuscript that you believe in, we take the publishing side just as seriously: the cover, the metadata, the funnel, the launch. Every step is treated as a craft problem with a real answer.

I will not talk down to you. I will assign real work and expect you to do it. I will be honest when something isn't working and specific about how to fix it. And I'll meet you where you are — whether you're drafting chapter one or revising chapter thirty. The only thing I ask is that you bring the same intellectual honesty to your work that I try to bring to mine.

The novel you want to write is possible. Let's get it written — and into the hands of the readers who've been waiting for it.