Intermediate Creative Writing: Narrative Prose - Form and Style

Catalog description

Every serious writer at some point asks: What is form? What is style? And how do I form my own style? In this course we will write our way towards answering each of those questions. Part laboratory, workshop, playground, and bootcamp, we'll examine exemplars from modern literature, but more importantly we'll write a lot: short pieces of narrative prose (micro stories, under 200 words), allowing for more focused experimentation, discussion, and revision towards acquisition of vital skills such as crafting the perfect sentence, writing humor, choosing the right perspective, knowing what to edit and when to cut, and understanding literary mechanisms in order to sharpen your techniques in wielding them. Because writers should be limited only by attempting the impossible, never by the bluntness of our tools. This course will prepare you for advanced creative writing electives, and the capstone, by helping you speak more clearly on the page. For style, according to the novelist Ali Smith, "is what happens when voice and form meet and fuse into something more than both." Through the alchemy of creative writing we'll find out what that something is.