Creative Writing 2024

Class Overview 

Fiction Tools/Lessons

Structure: Turning Phrases: Craft on the sentence level

Descriptive Writing Techniques

Structure: Spatial Paragraph Organization

Creating Characters

An Unusual Perspective Exercise

Writing Dialogue and Explanations V+ Dialogue Exercise 

Writing Flash Fiction

Six-Word Memoirs

Point of View: Looking Deeper

Suspense, Complication, Climax

Humor: Ways of Being Funny

Structure: Beginnings, Middles and Ends

First Lines and Starting Stories

Writing Endings

The Nuts and Bolts of Writing

Developing Themes

Revision

Poetry Tools/Lessons

The Power of Words: Sound, rhythm and performance

Writing with Metaphor

Using your ears: considering again the music of words

Readings

• A & P by John Updike

• Spunk by Zora Neale Hurston

• Hills Like White Elephants by Earnest Hemingway

• Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff

• The Use of Force by William Carlos Williams

• The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe

• First Confession by Frank O'Connor

• The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

• The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty

• Welding with Children by Tim Gatreaux  √+ Welding with Children Inspired Story

• Enemies by Anton Chekhov

• Mother Sauvage by Guy de Mauppasante

• The Last Question Isaac Asimov

• Little Things by Raymond Carver

• Bellinda and the Monster, collected by Italo Calvino (no etext)

• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe

• My Lack of Gumption by Russell Baker (no etext)

• The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• The Werewolf by Angela Carter

• A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

• Conversation With My Father and Wants by Grace Paley (Audio and Video)

• Arcola Girls by Philip F. Deaver