October 18, 2025

Write Stunning Sentences

Nina Schuyler

Sentences are a writer’s raw material. Painters have paint, sculptors have clay—we have words. And choosing the best words in the best order moves prose from ordinary to extraordinary. During this one-hour class, we’ll explore branching sentences and the cumulative structure. We’ll consider when a sharp fragment, a non-sentence, says more than a full sentence, and experiment with rhythm and sound. I’ll present examples from published work, then you’ll use their architecture to shape sentences of your own. By the end, you’ll have five powerful stylistic moves at your fingertips—and a sharper ear for the music of prose.

Nina Schuyler’s story collection, In This Ravishing World, published in 2024, won the 2025 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. It also won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her novel, Afterword, won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. The Painting was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. The second editions of her bestselling craft books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal, will be published in January 2026. Her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won Best Microfiction 2025 and 2025 Best Small Fictions. For 17 years, she taught for the University of San Francisco’s MFA program and currently teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies.

Join us in person at
Sequoia Yacht Club
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441 Seaport Court
Redwood City, CA 94063