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Spring Registration Opens Feb 23
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OWC 304 E — Novel II: Plot and Structure

Quarter: Spring
Instructor(s): Jack Livings
Duration: 10 weeks
Location: Online
Date(s): Mar 31—Jun 2
Class Recording Available: Yes
Class Meeting Day: Tuesdays
Grade Restriction: Letter grade only
Class Meeting Time: 12:00—1:15 pm (PT)
Tuition: $1240
   
Refund Deadline: Apr 2
 
Unit(s): 2
   
Enrollment Limit: 15
  
Status: Registration opens Feb 23, 8:30 am (PT)
 
Quarter: Spring
Day: Tuesdays
Duration: 10 weeks
Time: 12:00—1:15 pm (PT)
Date(s): Mar 31—Jun 2
Unit(s): 2
Location: Online
 
Tuition: $1240
 
Refund Deadline: Apr 2
 
Instructor(s): Jack Livings
 
Grade Restriction: Letter grade only
 
Enrollment Limit: 15
 
Recording Available: Yes
 
Status: Registration opens Feb 23, 8:30 am (PT)
 
This course is not open to the public, but rather by admission only. For more information on the Online Writing Certificate Program and its application process, please click here.

In this course, students will focus on how to create and sustain the “long middle” of their novels, continuing their journey toward the completion of their manuscript. The long middle is the area where plot and structure of the novel are most important, because we may have lost that burst of energy that propelled our beginnings, but the end is not yet in sight. This course will teach students how to continue building suspense and intensity past the inciting incident by alternating between different subplots and points of view, to ensure modulation; and framing scenes and chapters for maximum tension, to keep readers turning pages.

JACK LIVINGS
Author

Jack Livings is the author of the novel The Blizzard Party and the story collection The Dog, which received the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Rome Prize in Literature. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He teaches in the Program of Creative Writing at Princeton. Livings is a former contributing editor at The Paris Review. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.

Textbooks for this course:

(Required) Lysley Tenorio, The Son of Good Fortune (ISBN 978-0062059598)
(Required) Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (ISBN 978-0735219458)