First-Year Studies in Fiction: The Craft of Fiction

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Read everything that is good for the good of your soul. Then, learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend. Research, to the degree that it is illuminating, how the author’s life informs the text. Read work that is less than good, work in progress, to see that machinery more clearly. Learn to read your own work as if it were that of another. Try to figure out what interests you at the deepest level, but do not expose the secret parts of yourself to unkind scrutiny. What are you drawn to? What do you avoid? Admit your own mediocrity and believe in the optimism of revision. — Margot Livesey, The Hidden Machinery This course will be an exploration in both writing and reading fiction. We will learn to read as writers, looking at how the thing is made and how, through writing, meaning is shaped in fiction. In fall, full attention will be given to the short story. We will develop our craft through weekly exercises and experiments in form, character, narrative, stance, authority, point of view, dialogue, scene, situation, style, tropes, and syntax. Additionally, memory as a tool will be considered—both the writer’s memory as it is reimagined and reinvented in a work of fiction, family memory, historical memory, as well as the use of memory inside a work of fiction such as character memory, place memory, or historical memory. Students will develop stories from first draft through at least one revision. Students will complete a draft of a story every two weeks. Conference work will involve additional reading and redrafting and revising of work. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. First-Year Studies in…