CRW 4120 Spring 2020 Winegardner

In this nurturing, rigorous fiction workshop, the primary objective will be the creation and revision of competent apprentice-level literary short fiction. This course will make you a better writer—and a better reader—in a supportive, tough-love environment in which you're free to fail. You'll learn how to embrace the positive, liberating value of the kind of failure that's crucial to any true artist's apprenticeship.

At this stage in your apprenticeship, the number of technical skills you need to recognize and master is daunting. But we'll prioritize four bedrock fundamentals that you can think of the way a wannabe handyman might regard a hammer, saw, screwdriver, and wrench: basic stuff, but if you can't use them well, you can't do much of anything. 1. What's really meant by the oversimplified advice "show, don't tell." 2. Acute tension and chronic tension (what that means, how nearly all stories are an interplay between those two elements, and how those elements are created from the very opening of the story). 3. Basic short-story structure, with a particular emphasis on openings. 4. Basic narrative shapes.

"A writer," said Saul Bellow, "is a reader moved to emulation." "I know of no good, ignorant writers," wrote Richard Wilbur. "I think of great stories and novels," said Charles Baxter, "as permission-givers." This course will develop your writing in tandem with your reading, to eradicate ignorance, receive permission, and be moved to great heights of emulation. The strangeness of individual talent will not, I guarantee you, be blunted by such things. Quite the contrary.

For admission, students must have completed Fiction Technique with a B or higher.