CRW 3110 Summer 2023 Winegardner

This is a rigorous, nurturing, introductory fiction 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.

The focus is on learning to read like a writer and, ultimately, on generating and revising student work. You’ll write a series of brief exercises as well as one complete short story (which you’ll then revise and resubmit at the end of the term). So long as you put forth the dedication of an earnest apprentice, the course will make you a more sophisticated reader and a dramatically better writer. It will also ensure that you’re well prepared to excel in future, more advanced creative writing classes.

This 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). Here, you'll learn how to embrace the positive, liberating value of the kind of failure that's crucial to an artist's apprenticeship. Your primary goal should be to write a short story that reads as if you’ve read one before. Easy, right? (Spoiler alert: it's not. But it IS a realistic goal!)