Writing a short story can seem confusing, especially when there’s so much you want to say and so little space to say it in. What do you do with all those important details, those great side characters, and those pages of history? And how do you tie it all up in a meaningful way?

This weekend course is designed to give you a simple, clear roadmap to the writing of the short story, and to travel that road with you step by step, so that you become familiar with each twist and turn. Through a series of in-class exercises, you will develop a character, design a world for her/him to inhabit, discover a plot, and then write a narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end. By the end of the course, you should have a complete first draft of a short story to revise—and to serve as a model for future stories.

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You have all the ingredients for a great novel: a wonderful story to tell, fascinating characters to follow, and a compelling world to explore. Perhaps you’ve already written some pages and watched the sparks fly as your characters come together in all the complicated ways that real people do. The question now is how to make your novel work over hundreds of pages—and keep the reader turning those pages.

The answer is structure.

Structure includes plot but reaches beyond plot to include basic decisions about which parts of your story to tell in scene and which parts to summarize in exposition—and in what order those elements should come. Structure creates a clearly marked road map for the writer to follow.

This weeklong course is designed to help you figure out how to create a structure for your novel. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class creative exercises you will be invited to share with the group, we will:
· Explore the desires that drive your most important characters to act
· Understand how the conflict that starts with your protagonist creates your plot
· Experience how scene works as a dramatic unit, and how it combines with exposition to cover large spans of time
· Make decisions about which parts of your story to tell in scene
· Explore the idea of character arc, in which characters struggle and change in response to events

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