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 planning. Planning includes plot outlining, of course, but reaches beyond plot to include basic decisions about structure, meaning which parts of your story to tell in scene and which parts to summarize in exposition—and in what order those elements should come. Planning also includes thinking through the conflict driving your story, as well as the characters that populate it, and the somewhat slippery concepts of tone and voice essential to narration. Planning creates a clearly marked road map for the writer to follow. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class creative exercises that 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; and explore the idea of character arc, in which characters struggle and change in response to events. At the end of this course, you will have: a clear statement of what your protagonist wants, what stands in the way, and how this conflict is ultimately resolved at the end; a plot outline; a scene list; a character arc for your protagonist. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Just a page or two in length, flash fiction is quick and easy to learn, yet endlessly rich and challenging to write. Flash can be realistic or fantastic, heartfelt or ironic, as simple as a fairytale or as fragmented and allusive as a postmodern novel. Its singular power is the sense of imaginative freedom at its core—the “flash.” World-renowned writers like Kafka and Kawabata have done some of their most evocative work in the genre. This weekend intensive course is designed for writers who want to explore the creative possibilities of flash fiction. We will talk about the origins of flash and how it works, read a variety of published examples, and generate work of our own through in-class and take-home exercises. We will share our writing with the group. Over the weekend, you will write in-class and take-home flash exercises, read published flash fiction, and share work with the group. You’ll learn about the origins and types of flash fiction, the role of conflict in creating story, the power of image and metaphor, and the relationship between text and subtext. By the end of the weekend, you will take away at least two new works of flash fiction, and a list of ideas for ten others. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.