CRW 4120 Spring 2022 Winegardner

The objective of this nurturing, rigorous fiction workshop is the creation, revision, and realization of competent apprentice-level short fiction. The course is structured so that you’re free to fail (and you will), but you'll learn how to embrace the positive, liberating value of the kind of failure that's crucial to any true artist's apprenticeship. If you do the work and trust the process, you're certain to walk away from this class a more sophisticated reader and a dramatically better writer.

We’ll prioritize four fundamentals that you can think of the way a handyman might regard a hammer, saw, screwdriver, and wrench—simple, maybe, but if you can't use them well, you can't do much of anything:
1. What's really meant by the oversimplified advice "show, don't tell."
2. Acute tension and chronic tension (what that means, how nearly all stories are an interplay between
those two elements, how those elements are created from the very opening of the story).
3. Short-story structure, with a particular emphasis on openings.
4. Basic narrative shapes.

This course meets the Scholarship in Practice (s) requirement for Liberal Studies.