CRW 4120 Fall 2024 - Winegardner

This course (taught by a New York Times Bestselling author who’s also a 5-time winner of FSU-wide teaching awards) is a nurturing, rigorous fiction workshop focused on the creation, revision, and realization of competent apprentice-level short fiction. The primary objective is 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!)

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 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, a more adept editor, and a dramatically better writer.

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.

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