CRW3110 - Spring 2025 - Li

This class will be a rigorous, nurturing, introductory fiction workshop for aspiring fiction writers and critics. As the title suggests, this course aims to promote an intense and rewarding engagement with the craft of fiction. Your focus will be on generating and revising student work, familiarizing yourself with the fundamental building blocks of fiction writing, and producing quality stories for publication. This course will culminate in a single round of workshops, during which you'll draft and submit one complete short story (which you'll later revise and resubmit at the end of the term). So long as you put forth the dedication of an earnest apprentice, you should expect to walk away from this class 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 as a safe environment for apprentice authors to experiment and fail. 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.