The resulting series is more than Six Easy Pieces (sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves). In 13 lessons, Mosley gives real talk coupled with some requisite tough love on the writing process, some of which he also shared with The Root for an upcoming episode of our literary podcast, The Root Presents: It’s Lit! 

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“People always come up to me when I’m doing a reading or an event, and they say, ‘Well, how do you write a novel?’” he explained when asked what attracted him to the MasterClass format. “And it’s not that much to write a novel, but it’s a little bit too long for me to just sit down and say, you know what I’m saying? You have to make more of a little bit more of a commitment than that. So the two books I wrote I think are really useful, and also, the MasterClass is also a thing where people can listen and learn and kind of, you know, engage. And then, I think if I did it right...then people will be able to learn about writing, and I know a lot about writing and also about talking about writing,” he chuckled. “I know a lot about talking about writing.”

Mosley’s path to becoming a bestselling writer didn’t begin in elite graduate programs; he began taking writing courses in his mid-30s. Thirty years and countless accolades later, he’s still no elitist when it comes to the craft of writing.

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“Writers are writers,” he told us. “You know, writers can be hanging out on the street corner in Atlanta....prisons are filled with writers. People just writing their stories down, you know. And maybe it’s just letters; a lot of people writing novels; a lot of people writing poetry.”

Regardless of the genre, Mosley maintains the true power of writing isn’t in the finished product.

“I do think that everybody should write a novel,” he said. “Doesn’t matter if everybody publishes a novel; I don’t care if they do. But even if you don’t, to write a novel opens yourself to yourself. And I think that’s really important.”

Walter Mosley’s course on Fiction & Storytelling is available on MasterClass now.