CRW 4120 Winegardner Spring 2021

In this nurturing, rigorous fiction workshop, the primary objective will be the creation and revision of competent apprentice-level 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 fundamentals that you can think of the way a 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.

Prerequisite: B or higher in Fiction Technique or permission of instructor.