Technical Seminars

John Gardner said that the writer’s task is to create “a vivid and continuous fictional dream.” This technical seminar will focus on the role of detail in maintaining this dream. In this course we will deconstruct and rebuild our understanding of concepts like simile, showing vs. telling, and symbolism, asking what these tools do and what purpose they serve. Drawing from fiction and essays from Ottessa Moshfegh, Barbara Comyns, Zadie Smith, and others, students will practice noticing, seeing anew, and finding fresh and unexpected ways of describing. We will also examine what is worthy of detail in the first place, how detail functions outside of traditional scene, and the merits and limits of specificity, mimesis, and verisimilitude. Finally we will consider what it means to travel across a landscape of vagueness and euphemism as we search for the quality of “thisness” that James Wood claims all great details possess. In addition to assigned readings, students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises and peer critiques applying these lessons.

Day/Time: Thursday, 11:00am-1:50pm

This reading and writing seminar will focus on works of literature that have found shape and substance via documents such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, legal documents, medical records, and more. Students will analyze the causes and effects of the archival impulse on various craft elements, including: dramatic pacing, narrative persona, structure, and theme. Students will conduct independent research according to the genre of their choosing (from memoirs to novels and poems) and write short critical reading reports throughout the quarter. All the while, students will compose and/or compile their own archival materials for creative experiments that test the limits and possibilities of the craft.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 11:00am-1:50pm

"Do you like sentences?" Such is the litmus test posed to would-be writers in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. In order to understand narrative, we often go abstract—we summarize, we speak of structure, we read between the lines—yet everything that happens in fiction still happens in sentences. Some writers therefore make the sentence the cynosure of all effort: they dazzle. Others forge a rough music out of odd locutions and interrupted sense. In this course we'll study (and appreciate) such limit cases, as well as sentences of quieter grace, while reserving the most of our effort for sentences of our own, testing them against the manifold requirements of narrative: pace, logic, voice, and flow. In exercises and communal editing sessions we'll trim, paste, lard, complicate, rewrite, recast, and sometimes simply delete sentences by ourselves and others. And the more we relish what might seem like tedium, the more we'll prove that we do like sentences.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

Whether a memoir operates in the past or present tense, its narrator must reckon with some kind of unfinished business. While memory is the raw material of an autobiographical story, the drama exists inside the act of remembering, of reckoning with the “why” or “how” a narrator’s previous character or worldview has been transformed. In this class, we will study the structural, tonal, and representational possibilities of the "privileged perspective”: the vantage point from which a narrator writes across time and emotional distance from an experience, usually with the goal of resolution, revelation, or the conveyance of something that can only be approximated. We will close-read a number of contemporary memoirists that teach us how the privileged perspective works to drive forward a narrator’s agenda while upholding the reader’s stake in a story, exploring a multitude of interpretations through student-led presentations. Authors may include Jean-Dominique Bauby, Vladimir Nabokov, Vivian Gornick, Hisham Matar, Darin Strauss, and Joan Didion. In addition to one group presentation, students will be expected to track and analyze the functions of the privileged perspective via critical reading reports and technical writing prompts.

Day/Time: Friday, 10:20-12:20 PM

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class. He class will also be linked with the History Department’s ExoTerra Imagination Lab:

https://history.uchicago.edu/sites/history.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/ExoTerraImaginationLab-StudentAnnouncement.pdf  

(Participation in ExoTerra will be for extra credit and optional.) 

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:40-12:40

What must an ending do? Tragic endings define the story that comes before; epiphany transcends it.  Some endings hardly matter at all—and that's okay.  Why do different stories demand different endings and how should we conceive of endings as we write towards them?  Our own stories go unfinished when we don't know how to end them—but what exactly is the nature of that failure?  Is the story like an equation that the ending has to solve?  Or might the tyranny of the perfect ending invite us to reconsider the nature of storytelling?  In this technical seminar we'll study fictions that end triumphantly (Austin), damningly (James), surprisingly (detective novels), and not at all (as in Kafka's unfinished novels).  We'll weigh the problems and politics of endings—the unexamined need for closure, the too-easy sacrifice of the heroine—and consider critical views from Aristotle, Benjamin, and Shklovsky. Creative exercises, such as writing new endings for set texts, will complement weekly critical responses and—in the end—a final paper.

Day/Time: Friday, 9:10-11:10

Third-person narration is a crucial tool in the writer's toolbox, handy--and in some cases practically crucial--for a variety of tasks. Yet its use and various possibilities can seem intimidating to some writers who may be far more comfortable with the "I". In this seminar, we'll examine third-person point-of-view, seeking to understand its uses more fully. We'll learn about free indirect discourse, psychic distance, artifice, tone, and omniscience. We'll carefully dissect a variety of texts, including excerpts or stories from Jonathan Dee, James Agee, Jennifer Egan, Danielle Evans, Ottessa Moshfegh, and others. Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 9:40-11:00 am (synchronous)

Poetry writing is often undertaken with solemnity, but perhaps we’ve been approaching it all wrong. What if we read Prufrock as stand-up comedy? Dickinson as a dark humorist?  Stein as a prankster? Along with rethinking the daring but subtle humor of a few classic poets, this course will trace specific kinds of comedic moves in contemporary poetry. We’ll try to understand the maneuvers that make for varieties of humor, such as absurdity, irony, satire, parody, ridicule, and dark humor. Readings may include work by John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Russel Edson, Bernadette Mayer, Dorthea Lasky, James Tate, Dean Young, Mary Ruefle, Wendy Xu, Anne Carson, and Kenneth Koch. Students should expect to complete a series of writing exercises, give a presentation, and write a final essay. All while smiling.

Day/Time: Monday, 12:40-2:40

The art of nonfiction is sometimes described as the art of leaving things out, and nowhere is this more pronounced and problematic than in capturing character. The way you characterize people, places, and things ultimately says as much about you, the author, as it does about what you’re characterizing, and the goal of this class is to teach you to do so economically yet accurately, or at least fairly. Not reductively. We’ll start with the surface: with the eccentricities, tics, and quirks that make someone who they are, or appear to be. How to capture these oddities without sliding into caricature? Writers often default to physical description, but we’ll devote as much or more effort to the verbal, i.e., to exercises in dialogue, whose true power is not to convey information but character. We’ll also practice writing in body language, which is equally revealing of mien, demeanor, and underlying motivation. Beneath it all lies what we call ‘true character’: the values, morals, and ideals evident in deeds, facts, and what we might call properties, the essential characteristics of a culture, city, or place. Our weekly reading and writing assignments and exercises will culminate in a creative portfolio and a final essay, as well as the skills you’ll need to take workshops.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

What is plot beyond the events that take place in a story? What is its function beyond engaging us in what happens to the story’s characters? If plot is dramatic movement in a narrative, in what ways can it move within and outside the traditional arc of rising action, climax, and denouement? And how can it become a vehicle for what we want to express about our characters, the world of our story or the world at large, our emotional or intellectual concerns, our very aesthetics as an artist? In this technical seminar, we’ll tackle such questions by examining 1) the broader, evolving cultural perspectives on plot and what that tells us about how and why we narrativize our lives, and 2) the practical mechanics of plot and its interaction with all the other crucial elements of a dramatic narrative. And alongside writing exercises where we’ll apply these lessons to our own fiction, our conversations will ideally help each of us clarify the kinds of stories we want and need to tell. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:40-5:40