CRW 4120 Fall 2023 Winegardner
In this workshop—taught by a New York Times-bestselling novelist and 4-time teaching-award winner in FSU’s elite MFA/PhD-granting creative writing program—you will focus on the creation, revision, and realization of competent apprentice-level short fiction.
The course is structured so that you’re free to fail (students who do all the work earnestly and on time are GUARANTEED a grade no lower than a B), 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, approaching them the way an apprentice carpenter would a hammer, saw, screwdriver, and wrench—simple tools, but until you master them, you can't do much of anything:
- What's really meant by the oversimplified advice "show, don't tell."
- Acute and chronic tension (what that means, how nearly all stories are an interplay between those two elements, how this is established at the very beginning of the story).
- Short-story structure, with an emphasis on openings.
- Basic narrative shapes.
The course will also touch on such practical matters as how (and when) to start publishing, how (and whether) to apply to graduate creative writing programs, and how to make a living as a working writer.