Telling Stories '21

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”This famous first line from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude immediately pulls the reader in. How do you come up with great first lines? How do you keep the reader reading? How do you make your characters come alive on the page? We’ll explore all these questions—and many more—in this course on creative writing. In specific, we’ll study the fundamental elements of fiction (characterization, plot, setting, dialogue, pacing) and do exercises designed to develop your skills in these areas. We’ll also read stories and novel excerpts from famous writers, analyzing their fiction for technique, learning how writers create the effects they do. On occasion, I’ll also ask you to do written analyses of texts we’re reading. Finally—and most importantly—every student will craft her or his own fiction. This course above all is dedicated to creativity and to learning about literature from a whole new perspective: that of the writer.