This Masterclass takes a lot out of me, which is why I only offer it a handful of times a year.

The nature of this work requires a specific environment. That’s why I limit each workshop to just twelve people for a two-day, five-hour intensive.

When I open enrollment, spots tend to fill quickly. So if you’ve been waiting for this course to return, now is the time to secure your place..

DATES:

Saturday, January 24
10:00–12:30 p.m. EST

Sunday, January 25
10:00–12:30 p.m. EST

ON ZOOM — details sent after purchase

Workshop fee: $179 (plus tax)
Premium members: 15% off — $152.15 (plus tax = $165.65)

How to Write Complex Emotion

Feelings are difficult to name, harder still to render on the page.

Most writers approach emotion indirectly. To convey loss, they might describe a father watching a stranger lift his young daughter into the air on a beach. The ache lives in the subtext, and meaning gathers in the negative space. In literature, what's visible often stands in for what cannot be said.

But what if suggestion isn't enough? What if your goal is not just to imply emotion, but to embody it, so the reader experiences it in their own nervous system?

Traditional writing instruction emphasizes interpretation, analysis, and structural critique.

This workshop inverts that paradigm: we begin with the body’s internal signals and move outward to language.

Participants learn to observe emotion as it manifests physiologically, through shifts in temperature, pulsation, tension, and vibration, and to translate these patterns into prose that conveys felt experience rather than abstract description.

Drawing on clinical psychology, neuroscience, somatic-experience practices, method-acting techniques, and my lifetime navigating panic disorder, I teach writers how to track emotion as it registers in the body and convert these sensations into prose that transmits feeling rather than merely naming it.

You'll learn to work from raw sensation to felt texture to interpreted emotion and finally to expressive language, through a guided progression I developed while writing my memoir Little Panic and have since taught to hundreds of writers.

By the end of the course, you’ll not only have a new set of tools for elevating your prose, you’ll increase your emotional granularity and literacy.

You'll leave with writing that doesn't just describe emotion, it transmits it.

I hope you’ll join us!

Amanda