About Sandra Novack-Gottshall
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Complete List of Writers.com Classes
The Art and Craft of Short Stories (10 Weeks)
For beginning and intermediate writers
Unlike the sheer breadth and panoramic landscape of novels, short stories demand a myopic focus and compact portrayal of setting, character, and plot. Their shorter length forces us to make smart decisions because, as Janet Burroway insightfully suggests, "The greater the limitation in time and space, the greater the necessity for pace, sharpness, and density." Short story writers must be ever concise with prose, economic with setting and significant detail, clever with plot structure and formation, and deft at portraying characters and value--events measured not by time but by the intensity of the experience rendered. These considerations place rigorous demands on new and experienced writers alike.
This course is designed for writers who wish to better understand the possibilities and limitations of the short story form. We'll look at how the relative length of our stories affects the choices we make about character, setting, conflict, and structure. During ten weeks, you'll learn to craft works that feel more complex; you'll hone your writing skills and become more selective about fictive choices; and you'll start to create impressions of worlds that affect, stimulate, and inspire your readers every bit as much as any novel.
This is a lecture-based course that follows Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction. You will be asked to complete weekly exercises with the aim of better understanding technique. You will also be asked to write an original story for week eight (with a length of 500 words), as well as offer critical and supportive feedback to your colleagues. Since reading is essential to our development as writers, we will also be reading and discussing a few short stories and developing the working vocabulary needed to think critically about our own work. You will receive detailed feedback on your work in a collaborative and non-threatening atmosphere.
Suggested Text: Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
Class Outline (subject to change in order to meet the needs of the class)
Week One:
Introductions, overview of the course. Lecture: Introduction to the writing process: getting started, freewriting, keeping it going, writing through failure. Exercise: Sources of fiction--where and how to find material.
Week Two:
Part one: Story and plot, conflict, crisis, and resolution. Strategies for organization. Part Two: Seeing and believing. How to create significant detail; showing and telling. Options for opening and closing a story. Writing exercise: Understanding form. Reading assignment.
Week Three:
Focus on characterization: credibility, purpose, and complexity. Authorial interpretation: The indirect method of character presentation. Appearance and action: The direct methods of character presentation. Exercise.
Week Four:
More on characterization. Speech, thought, conflict of presentation. Exercise: Sharpening the characterization in our stories.
Week Five:
Setting and atmosphere. Harmony and conflict between character and background. Alien and familiar settings. Symbolic and suggestive setting. Aspects of narrative time: Summary and scene, flashback, and slow motion. Evoking a vivid sense of place and time. Exercise and reading.
Week Six:
Point of view. Who speaks? First, second, and third person. To whom do we speak? In what form? Spatial and temporal distance. Limitation of voice: The unreliable narrator. Exercise: Selecting the best viewpoint for your story needs.
Week Seven:
Dialogue and scene. Scene vs. summary: When to say and not to say. Using dialogue to both advance your plot and to deepen your characterizations. Status changes and power conflicts in dialogue. Exercise: Handling dramatic action.
Week Eight:
Theme: How do fictional elements contribute to theme? Why is theme important? Part Two: Description and word choice: Choosing effective details; matters of style, active voice, prose rhythm, and mechanics.
Week Nine:
Revision: Transforming promising first drafts into finished, polished fiction.
Week Ten:
Publishing houses, submission practices. Finding a home for your work.
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Literary Short Story Workshop(10 Weeks)
For beginning to intermediate writers. An introduction to workshopping the short-story.
Designed for those with an understanding of fiction fundamentals, this is a workshop for beginning to intermediate writers who have a draft ready to go. Each person in class will be responsible for submitting an initial rough draft (10 pages maximum) and one subsequent major revision. This is an actual workshop, meaning there are no formal lectures unless they are necessary to supplement discussion and/or questions that arise during our time together. Rather, you will learn through comments specifically geared toward your work-in-progress, as well as others' works. My feedback will build upon the basic principles of fiction and/or introduce new techniques to you.
The goals of the Introductory Fiction Workshop are as follows:
1. To create and workshop a fiction draft up to 10 pages in length.
2. To revise and workshop this draft once more during the course of the class, with the general aims of learning the craft and discipline of revision, as well as fiction techniques.
3. To partake in the workshopping of other writers, with the general aim of better understanding your own stories as well as what works and doesn't work in writing.
Writers in the Introductory Fiction Workshop are expected to offer feedback on each story presented. Generally speaking, we workshop two stories a week. Summative comments should first address positive aspects of the works-in-progress and then move on to constructive criticism. We will be discussing *how* to critique manuscripts more during our time together as well.
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Continuing Short Story Workshop (10 weeks)
Pre-requisites: The Art and Craft of Short Stories OR an introductory class in writing short stories. This is an advanced level course.
This continuing workshop in writing short-stories builds upon lessons learned in The Art and Craft of Short Stories and/or introductory creative writing classes. It assumes at least a fundamental understanding of fiction: plot, description and significant details, characterization, setting and atmosphere, point of view, and theme. Working from these points, we will develop a more complex understanding of them. In addition, we will focus on more advanced principles of plot structure and variation, motif, and narrative unity in fiction.
During the course of ten weeks, I am asking that you spend a significant amount of your time not with lectures or writing exercises, but engaged in the creation of a ten to twenty page fiction manuscript. Once you have workshopped your piece, you will be asked to submit one subsequent revision of your initial submission to the class. A major component of this course is revision. Not only will we be practicing it, but also talking about it for the purpose of strengthening and refining our own writing skills. Each week, we will workshop two to three manuscripts, and writers participating in this class will also be expected to provide significant input on each story. The general aim of
this practice is to develop as writers; when we learn to engage critically with other texts -- to evaluate narrative framework, plot formation, details, characterization and language -- we also learn to better approach our own writing.
The goals of the Continuing Short-Story Workshop are as follows:
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Learning from Other Writers: Inspiration, Parody, and Mimicry (8 Weeks)
Prerequisite: Introductory fiction classes. This is an advanced level fiction class.
All writers agree that reading is an essential component for learning to write good stories, yet few like to think about the possibilities inherent in actual mimicry. Why is this? Most, if not all, other art forms take advantage of parodying and even copying directly from others. Line by line, painters sketch the work of artists such as Rodin and Jacques-Louis David to better understand the possibilities inherent in shape, form, and color. Composers study intensely the counterpoint and orchestration in the works of Bach, Wagner, and Debussy. Yet, oddly enough, many writers cling to the idea of the "original" voice, style, and plot. They often hold a false belief that their work takes place in isolation from all other works of fiction. But, if we look at the stories of Richard Bausch, we can see the influence of Raymond Carver. If we look at Carver, we can find Hemingway and Anderson. Eudora Welty's wonderful story, "No Place for You, My Love" clearly borrows techniques from Virginia Woolf. Cormac McCarthy's sentences and plots owe at least an influence to Faulkner. Why should we expect to begin our journeys with a unique voice, one unleashed with a fury, unlike any other? Why do we think plots are so original? Our style so uniquely our own?
This class challenges the notion of uniqueness and in fact revels in the joy of copying from masters and working closely with other texts. In this eight week, exercise-based course, we will read contemporary (and not so contemporary) works of fiction. We will draw inspiration from lines, write from "holes" left in other stories, engage in parody, copy language, rhythm, and style, and learn about traditional and experimental forms.
Please note: This class is considered by most writers to be an extremely productive though challenging one, so it is best suited to those very serious about writing and craft. You will be producing *several* short pieces of completed fiction during eight weeks. Although it is likely many of the stories will speak to you, some may not. In that case, you will be asked to write outside the lines of mere inspiration.
Story posts given each week in PDF Files.
Syllabus
Week I: Writing a list story, working from Francois Camoin's Things I Did to Make It Possible.
Week II: Writing a conflict-interaction, working from one of the following stories:
Grace Paley's Wants
Pam Painter's I Get Smart
Donald Barthelme's The Baby
Rod Kessler's How to Touch a Bleeding Dog
Week III:
Part I: Working from other writers, copying directly to understand style and form.
Part II: Writing the first page of a story in that style. Work with one of the following:
James Joyce's Ulysses
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants
Week IV: Writing from a "hole" left in another story, working from one of the following:
Victoria Redel's Where the Road Bottoms Out
Raymond Carver's Chef's House
Week V: Writing the start of a story using an object as inspiration, working from one of the following:
Ann Beattie's Janus
Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl
Week VI: Writing from a minor character's POV, working from one of the following:
Peter Orner's The Raft
Ryan Harty's Why the Sky Turns Red When the Sun Goes Down
Week VII: Good, Clean Prose: Building a Story with Words not Plot, working with Fire by Anne Brashler
Week VIII: Wrap up and discussion of submission practices.
Interchangeable: If you can't complete a week's exercise because you don't like the topic or stories/poems, substitute this:
Parody as Teacher: Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants
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Reading as Writers (Ten weeks)
For intermediate to advanced writers, OR if a beginning writer, permission of the instructor
The best way to become a good literary writer is to read good literary fiction. It sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet often we read not as writers but as consumers instead. People who enjoy reading love to immerse themselves in other worlds without thinking about the hard-earned work that takes place on the page, work that creates and evokes this feeling of transcendence. It's no wonder our identification with fiction so often compels us to write our own stories and construct our own worlds; yet, to do this, we need to think and read differently--as writers--with a more critical eye for understanding those aspects of craft that shape and build satiating stories.
Designed to meet requests made in many of my classes, Reading as Writers offers a space where we read to better understand narrative possibilities. By bettering our critical eye, we better our own stories. Plain and simple. In that regard, while the topic of this course is reading, the real subject of this course is the craft of writing.
During the course of ten weeks, you will be asked to read several stories and write a 3-5 page craft/technique analysis for an assigned story from Best American Short Stories 2004, O'Henry 2005, or The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. You will also be asked to weigh in each week and respond to others' analyses for the purpose of fueling discussion. We will address the notions of value and weight in fiction; character movement; voice; patterns of repetition and variation at the level of plot, subplot, and image; conflict vs. connection; traditional and nontraditional plot construction and whatever else might be of interest to you.
We'll be looking at Alice Munro's Runaway, Jill McCorkle's Intervention, Sherman Alexie's What You Pawn I Will Redeem, Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Christine Schutt's You Drive, and more.
Please note: This is a class where the majority of work comes from participants, so hefty engagement with reading material is expected and in fact required for the class to be successful. You will only get out of this what you put into it. My job, as your coach, is to read your analyses of stories, make sure you're on the page, deepen and build upon your insights, and add my own thoughts on aspects of craft. There are no workshop submissions or writing exercises, though I expect and hope that as you read and discuss published works you'll be working on your own and translating these ideas to stories.
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