Stimulate your imagination by creating new work that startles with fresh language, avoids clichés, moves readers with a potent universal theme, entertains with mystery sustained until the proper moment, presenting memorable characters to care about. With an eye toward publication, improve your stories through feedback from other students and your Instructor, including careful line edits to prepare your manuscripts so you feel confident sharing them with the world, if you so chose.
Want to gain more understanding of what drives a plot in conventional fiction, both Genre and Literary, and what ways you can stray from tradition to fit your unique vision and still make it accessible and entertaining? Want to grasp the ins and outs of Point of View and what works when and what surely does not? Would you like to write believable dialogue that’s not an info dump but resembles real life? How about a hook that draws in readers so they can’t look away, correct grammar, and an ending that impacts people strongly in ways they can’t forget?
If so, join us.
COURSE OUTLINE
Participants will complete a story which is critiqued, and be empowered to:
- Approach a blank piece of paper confident they can put down something spontaneously
- Determine why you like some fiction
- Be able to follow up your interests from a variety of options of types of fiction
- Break through patterns of error after reading our line edits
- Understand the classic plot structure, hook, MacGuffin, relationship of the active protagonist and thwarting antagonist as they encounter each other with rising tension levels, creating Plot Reversal, leading to climax and resolution, as well as employ fresh, surprising language and avoid cliché, which showing rather than telling in a narrative format of action moment by moment
Each week involves multiple readings within lectures, feedback from Instructor and fellow students on assignments, questions and discussions. This is a simplified version of the syllabus you will receive in class.
Week One Lecture: Visage
Narrative VS expository, the relationship of Genre and Literary, clarity of writing, relationship between you and the narrator, description of characters
Assignment: After posting a photo of yourself and your background, describe your face in context, in narrative format, with some change happening. Then, write about someone else’s face. If you prefer to do an innovative take on these, you can, but it must not be expository, so no “he used to do this, and she often did that.”
Week Two Lecture: Developing Empathy for Your Readers
Spontaneous writing similar to hypnagogia, revising for the sake of others through empathy, realism, conflict, transformation, beginning and ending, show don’t tell, avoiding a slow start, surprising language rather than clichés, writing from the body to affect a physical change in the reader, voice, muscular prose
Assignment: Write spontaneously. Revise that one, keeping the reader in mind according to the topics discussed in the lecture and reading.
Week Three Lecture: Techniques to Achieve Your Desired Effects
POV, reliable and unreliable narrators, privileged to go into more than one person’s inner thoughts, more on voice, tense, flashbacks, foreshadowing, timing, pacing, taking the reader someplace, adrenalin response, misdirection, avoiding preaching, theme and message
Assignment: Write a piece of prose with characters engaging in an environment with action, briefly, from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd point of view, as well as with a reliable and unreliable narrator.
Week Four Lecture: Making an Impact Word by Word
Creating an effect with words, word-driven fiction, sounds of consonants, numbers of syllables, accents, rhythm, not too many adjectives, subplot, subtext
Assignment: Write at least a paragraph, and up to a page, in which you pay attention to the rhythm, pacing, sounds of the letters, accent on syllables, length of words, length of sentences.
Week Five Lecture: People Engaging in Conflict in an Environment
Realistic dialogue, well rounded characters we care about, alternatives, not too many characters, protagonist and antagonist, gestures, setting, timing of introducing characters, hook, motif, active characters, going beyond formula, beginning/middle/end
Assignment: Write a little dialogue by some characters established in a setting. Fill it in with more than simple dialogue, including description and action. Begin gathering ideas, moods, goals, characters, etc. for your major story.
Week Six Lecture: Multi-level Action
Plot, layers of symbols, undercutting, active verbs, structure, symbolism, motifs, echoing, transformation, plot arc, affect, plot reversals, Hero’s Journey
Assignment: Write at least one sentence question or comment about the readings on plot reversals and Hero’s Journey. Continue working on your stories.
Week Seven Lecture: Targeting to Your Audience
Tailoring to magazines, overcoming writer’s block, explorations, outlines, plot approaches
Assignment: Explore literary magazines, and other methods and share some experience. Turn in plot outlines.
Week Eight Lecture: Completion
The ending, transition to next chapter, revision and proofing
Assignment: Post complete story by the end of the week, making sure the ending is strong.
Week Nine Lecture: Possibilities
Slipstream, Magical Realism, Historical, etc.
Assignment: Do one of 3 options. If you want, revise and post the new version of your story. Another option is to re-imagine the story as a different type of fiction. The other option is to write a completely different story, a flash fiction piece, which is 1000 words or shorter, stretching yourself into one of these types of fiction that maybe you wouldn’t have written otherwise.
Week Ten Lecture: Moving Onward
Persona of the writer, interacting with material and the public, Duotrope, yahoo list for opportunities, magazines that nominate for prizes, Goodreads, Linked in, Facebook, Authonomy, Zoetrope, writing reviews, agents, contests, exclusivity, chapbooks, interviews, queries, e-books, the novel, novellette, novella, short story collections, getting reviews, open mics, anthologies, magazines, submitting, bios, web pages, blogs, persona.
Assignment: Comment on the revisions or new stories and share anything else you want with everyone as we finish up. Write a line bio of no more than 6 lines on the page. Tell us what your publication strategy is if that is something that interests you.
