FICT 54 W — Short Fiction Workshop: Build a Story from the Ground Up
Quarter: Winter
Instructor(s): Thomas McNeely
Date(s): Jan 15—Mar 19
Class Recording Available: Yes
Class Meeting Day: Wednesdays
Class Meeting Time: 5:30—6:30 pm (PT)
Tuition: $1000
Refund Deadline: Jan 17
Unit(s): 2
Enrollment Limit: 18
Status: Open
Quarter: Winter
Day: Wednesdays
Duration: 10 weeks
Time: 5:30—6:30 pm (PT)
Date(s): Jan 15—Mar 19
Unit(s): 2
Tuition: $1000
Refund Deadline: Jan 17
Instructor(s): Thomas McNeely
Enrollment Limit: 18
Recording Available: Yes
Status: Open
What is the artistic process from journal entry, notebook scribble, or anecdote to polished draft? In this course, we will explore not only elements of craft but also the artistic decisions a writer makes in shaping raw experience into fiction. Each week, students will submit 500 words of a story, revising and incorporating the previous week’s submission. At the end of the quarter, each student will have a polished draft of a story. Along the way, we will explore how to transform our experience into fiction by manipulating point of view, setting, and the “ticking clock,” or narrative shape, of the story. We will also look at identifying important objects, images, or props within the story; finding the right age for our main character; creating binaries or opposing forces within a story; upping tension and stakes to create the arc of the story; and other issues. Each revision will focus on a single artistic objective and will be accompanied by stories from masters who exemplify each objective.
Although the time commitment for an online writing course is dependent upon one’s degree of participation, students should plan on investing 4–6 hours per week in order to gain substantial benefit from the course.
THOMAS MCNEELY
Author
Thomas McNeely is the author of Pictures of the Shark: Stories, a Foreword INDIES award finalist and a Massachusetts Book Awards "Must Read" longlist selection, and the novel Ghost Horse, recipient of the Gival Press Novel Award. He has received an NEA fellowship in prose, and his stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and other magazines and anthologies and been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize. McNeely was a Jones Lecturer and Stegner Fellow at Stanford and received an MFA from Emerson College. Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Anne Bernays & Pamela Painter, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers (ISBN 978-0062720061 )