The Rabbit Room

For this installment of the “Writing with…” series, we will do some light summer reading. P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves is widely considered to be the best and most representative of his Jeeves and Wooster books. Our narrator is the lovably dunderheaded, overprivileged, never-employed Bertie Wooster. His good-hearted but bumbling attempts to solve his friends’ and relatives’ problems (not to mention his own) always make matters worse, until his exceedingly capable valet Jeeves wades in and puts everything to rights.

The situations are funny, the characters are funny, the plots are funny, the narrator’s voice is funny, the dialogue is funny, almost every sentence is funny. Wodehouse isn’t exactly Dostoyevsky, but he’s a genius at what he does, and he does things that all storytellers need to be able to do.

In Writing with Jeeves and Wooster, we will read Right Ho, Jeeves in order to understand exactly how Wodehouse creates such a unique voice, such a tight (if formulaic) plot, such lovable characters. Then, through weekly writing exercises and mutual feedback and discussion with your colleagues, you will apply Wodehouse’s principles and techniques to your own writing.

Writing with Jeeves and Wooster includes six 90-minute live lectures* via Zoom, as well as a dedicated online forum for discussion and writing exercises. It will last from June 22nd to August 3rd.

Topics to be covered include (but are not limited to):

• Humor Writing
• First-Person Narration
• Dialogue
• Understatement and Overstatement
• Story structure
• Characterization
• Irony
• Tone
• Diction
• Narrative Pacing

*Recordings of the lectures will also be available for learners who can’t attend the live lectures.

Learn more and register at TheHabit.co/Jeeves.