Nonfiction Courses
Instructor: Minda Honey
Welcome to Orientation: How to root your reader in time, place and your emotional landscape
Common writing advice is that you should begin where the action begins BUT you must do so with finesse. Plopping your reader down mid-scene can be jarring if you don't simultaneously do the work of orienting them to your world. In this course we'll look at essay examples from writers who do it well and you'll get to try your hand at doing it yourself.
"It seems like x, but it's actually y": solving the formula at the heart of most essays
Now I know none of y'all got into writing to be fooling around with equations, but this one can help you shortcut your way to answering The Big Question — What is this essay about? In this course, we'll pair this simple formula with a moment from your life to use as kindling to get you going on your next essay (or help you snatch a messy work-in-progress into focus).
Fiction Courses
Instructor: Sarah Strickley
Writing From Life
If you've ever wondered how to transform the raw materials of life into powerful written work, this course might be for you. Writers will learn the difference between an engaging anecdote and a compelling work of art by experimenting in a variety of forms. Close readings of published work and writing exercises will draw forth the matters of craft at hand; we'll also wrangle with the ethical challenges raised by questions like: Is this my story to tell or does it rightfully belong to someone else?
Stories Re-Told
While most writers learn first through imitation, trying on modes and styles as they develop their own ways of telling a story, the practice of stealing words from others crosses a fairly clear ethical line, right? It's simple: don't plagiarize. That said, borrowing storytelling structures, characters, and ideas from canonical works in order to build transformative re-tellings is a long-standing (and ethically stable) tradition in literature. In this course, we'll investigate the art of retelling as it manifests in stories that pay homage to (and take umbrage with) their literary predecessors, playing with strategies for building our own takes on tales as old as time.
Poetry Courses
Instructor: Larry Thacker
The Stuff of Poetry: a wealth of matter
Tuning the poetic perceptions of our inner / outer worlds, our unique internal language, and interpreting this combination for expression upon the page. How re-interpretation of our worlds in orbit offer limitless material for poetic lives.
Larry’s Block Buster Grab Bag of Eternal Randomness (Generative)
(Writer’s) Block Busting is as simple as having random baskets of whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys, and hows from which to choose. Guaranteed to jar your creativity (especially when working from our writing from the day before!)
Fiction and Screenwriting Courses
Instructor: Ian Stansel
Novel Beginnings: Writing Effective First Chapters
Questions of how and where to begin a book plague novelists at every level of accomplishment. How do we capture the imagination of our readers and hold their attention? How do we hook them without offering gimmicks? In this session we’ll draw inspiration from some of classic and contemporary literature’s great openings and try to figure out how and why they work so well. Then, through in-class exercises, we’ll look at how you can employ these techniques in your own novel projects. Our focus will be on how we sculpt these early pages into compelling first sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that will urge both general readers and editors to turn to page two and beyond.
Screenwriting Essentials
Screenwriting is both an art and a craft. A script is both a creative work and a business proposal. In the session, we’ll dig into the essentials of screenplay format so that our scripts look professional, and we’ll look at effective film and TV scripts and try to emulate their success. We’ll talk about what a film does in its first act to hook the viewer, and the special things a TV pilot must do to establish the longer storylines of a show. Through in-class writing, we’ll try our hand at structuring and outlining, as well as work on character development. And we’ll discuss the particular art of writing visually for the screen.
Horror and Crime
Instructor: Gabino Iglesias
HORROR 101
In this class we will discuss the basic elements of horror fiction, the differences between various subgenres, and some of the expectations readers have when reading horror. We will talk about the main types of violence we find in horror and how pacing, descriptions, the supernatural, and economy of language operate within the genre and its offshoots to make horror such a diverse genre that is still, somehow, immediately recognizable. We will also work on understanding the role empathy plays in horror narratives as well as the importance of character development and place and how these elements can shape scary stories.
Let's Get Violent - How to Write Crime Fiction
In this class we will explore the most popular types of violence in crime fiction and work on understanding how violence can often be the start point for crime narratives. We will look at some of the most common violence types in contemporary crime fiction—phsyical, emotional, and sexual—and explore their dos, don'ts, and grey areas in between. We will also explore the role of positionality, Otherness, physicality, and other core elements of great character development in crime fiction. We will talk about the explosive, messy nature of violence and how to pace it to serve our writing while also looking at the role of language and studying the violence formula and our power—and need—to subvert it.