Crafting Successful Crime Fiction: How to Write the Action (Online Course)

(EGL 298 W)

Enjoy action movies and novels? Want to write the kind of page-turners that readers won't be able to put down? In this course, students will focus on how to write the great crime/noir action stories and novels that they have been eager to create their whole lives. Students will prepare their own crime short stories and novel beginnings—or develop novels currently in the works—with a keen eye on how to make their writing pop, sizzle, and move on the page. We will spend time on exercises for writing effective dialogue, descriptive action, and suspense, as well as come up with a compelling concept for a book. By reading classic writers of the genre such as Chandler, Hammett, and Thompson, as well as contemporary stars such as Lawrence Block and Megan Abbott, we will build a set of reference points to use for our discussions of student work. During the last half of the course, students will workshop their own stories or novel excerpts to get valuable feedback from their fellow writers and readers. In addition, we will discuss how to produce and promote your own writing as a podcast. Students will have the opportunity to publicize their work on the Web at CrimeWAV.com.

Please note: This is an online course.
For more information on additional online courses, please visit http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/onlinewriting/.

Seth Harwood, Lecturer in Continuing Studies

Seth Harwood received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, UMass Boston, and the City College of San Francisco, and his fiction has appeared in more than a dozen literary and crime/noir journals. His first novel, Jack Wakes Up, which he first serialized as a free audiobook, was published by Three Rivers Press (Random House). He also hosts the online series of crime story podcasts on CrimeWAV.com.

Preview the textbooks for this course:

The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler - ISBN 0394757653

The Best American Mystery Stories of the CenturY, Tony Hillerman, ed - ISBN 0618012710

Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern - ISBN 039332124X