FICT 99 W — Flash Fiction Workshop: Five Stories in Five Weeks
Quarter: Summer
Instructor(s): Stephanie Reents
Date(s): Jul 8—Aug 9
Class Recording Available: Yes
Tuition: $565
Refund Deadline: Jul 11
Unit(s): 1
Enrollment Limit: 19
Status: Closed
Quarter: Summer
Unit(s): 1
Duration: 5 weeks
Date(s): Jul 8—Aug 9
Tuition: $565
Refund Deadline: Jul 11
Instructor(s): Stephanie Reents
Enrollment Limit: 19
Recording Available: Yes
Status: Closed
Flash fiction invites playfulness and experimentation. Unlike the long short story, a flash story—a brief work of fiction ranging from 500 to 1,000 words—can be drafted in a single sitting. Although you have only a few pages (or paragraphs) to write a flash story, the fundamentals of fiction writing still hold. In this course, we will touch upon characterization, dialogue, point of view, detail and setting, and forward movement and plot by looking at a wide range of successful flash stories by Sandra Cisneros, Lydia Davis, Peter Orner, Venita Blackburn, and many other contemporary writers. We’ll discuss how the form’s economy and brevity challenge writers to hook readers from the very first sentence, to make judicious use of detail to imply the story, and to write toward zingy last lines.
Weekly prompts and Zoom writing sessions will encourage you to try new things, take risks, and use the writing process to discover your story and subject matter. Pamela Painter, who taught one of the first graduate workshops on flash fiction, will give a guest lecture, offering yet another perspective on the form. At the end of the five weeks, you will have written and received feedback on five brand-new stories.
Weekly prompts and Zoom writing sessions will encourage you to try new things, take risks, and use the writing process to discover your story and subject matter. Pamela Painter, who taught one of the first graduate workshops on flash fiction, will give a guest lecture, offering yet another perspective on the form. At the end of the five weeks, you will have written and received feedback on five brand-new stories.
STEPHANIE REENTS
Author
Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors' Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange voice at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Her novel We Loved to Run is coming out in 2025. Reents received a BA from Amherst, a BA from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Robert Shapard (Editor), James Thomas (Editor), Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (ISBN 978-0393328028)