CRW3110 – Spring 2027 – Udeh-Ubaka

Every story is made up of choices, including the ones a writer may not realize they are making. Why does this story need this particular narrator? Why start here instead of somewhere else? Why slow down for one moment and skip over another? Why does the dialogue feel alive here and falls flat there? These are some of the questions we will engage with in this course. Through intentional craft reading, discussion, writing exercises, and workshops, we will study the techniques writers use to build their stories. We will read published fiction with a writer's curiosity, taking stories apart to understand how they were built, and borrowing, testing, and transforming what we noticed in our own work. You will experiment with these techniques in your own writing, share work with your peers, and practice giving and receiving detailed/useful feedback. The goal is to leave you with a set of possibilities for your fiction and a more conscious sense of the choices available to you when a story is not yet doing what you want it to do.