Beginning Workshops

Scenes are often considered the building blocks of narrative story-telling. In this course, we’ll examine short fiction through the lens of scene, starting from the basics: What are scenes, how do they work, and what should they accomplish in a story? We’ll consider the scene’s relationship with context, tension, subtext, narrative arc, and other story elements. Together we’ll examine how authors like Bret Anthony Johnston, Rebecca Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri use scenes to great effect, with a particular focus on setting, dialogue, action, and detail. In addition to readings, students will complete several short writing exercises and one longer story, which you will workshop and substantially revise. You will also engage with the work of your peers, delivering thoughtful, encouraging, constructive critiques.

"All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey toward a lost land.” So wrote Janet Frame, a singularly talented author who was institutionalized at the age of 21, then saved from a lobotomy only because she won a literary prize. In keeping with Frame’s reflection, this course will focus on strategies for saving our lives through fiction writing: how to cultivate a convincing voice; how to extract strength from our writerly weaknesses; and, ultimately, how to forge a home for ourselves in our own words. Through a combination of creative exercises, we will explore and examine the craft components of strong, original fictions, including character development, descriptive detail, compelling dialogue, and rich sentences. We will learn how to read the works of published writers for creative inspiration, mining texts by masters such as Janet Frame, Alice Munro, Julio Cortazar, Sofia Samatar, and Yasunari Kawabata. We will also workshop original student writing throughout the term, developing a portfolio of stories that reflect our individual interests, desires, and needs as writers. 

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, with focus on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, with special emphasis on point of view (who speaks and why?). In-class exercises fire your creativity and get you writing. In workshop, each student has the opportunity to present work to the group.

In the same way that water is composed of two elements—hydrogen and oxygen—the personal essay essentially consists of anecdotes and reflections, i.e., facts and thoughts, or the objective and the subjective. What happened, and what what happened *means*. Our goal is to not only balance these two elements but to combine them so that they complement but also contradict one another.

This course introduces students to poetry writing by guiding students through generative exercises focused on imagery and diction, then revising the material with an eye toward formal shaping choices. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Crafting Complex Characters

In life and in fiction writing, character development is often synonymous with major challenges: obstacles that demand deep investigation, adaptation, and change. Using the character-driven models of Tove Ditlevsen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lucia Berlin, Edwidge Danticat, Eileen Chang, and other writers, this Beginning Fiction Workshop will explore strategies for crafting complex characters: illustrating their motives, perspectives, and arcs of evolution. Through a combination of generative writing exercises and writing workshops (wherein students will share original work and receive critical feedback from the class), each student will produce at least one complete short story.

In this class we will encounter short fiction in many forms, considering a range of narrative lengths, concepts, and writing styles, examining all of them from a craft perspective in an effort to decipher the ways in which stories can be put to paper with an efficiency of prose without sacrificing richness of language or conceptual creativity.

This workshop focuses on writing and revising poems, and the related art of giving helpful feedback to other writers. One of the course’s goals is to help you reflect on your writing as a process. Most weeks you will write drafts that focus on the poetic concepts we are studying. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio, accompanied by an artist’s statement you’ll write. As a class, we’ll form a community of readers and writers that will support you in this process. You’ll receive feedback on your drafts from your classmates and will respond constructively to theirs. At the same time, this course will introduce you to poetry from a variety of time periods, languages, and approaches to content and structure. You’ll learn to apply critical tools and terminology by drafting poems that experiment with elements such as form, voice, rhythm, imagery, translation, and creative response. We’ll discuss not only how and why poems are written, but also what relationship they have to the worlds in which they are written and read.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter. In particular, we will explore the boundaries of "poetic language" and utterance through bordered genres like prose poem, concrete/visual poem, sound poetry, and lyric essay, including work by poets visiting the UChicago campus. Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor.

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or woodworking, or gardening. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.