FICT 43 W — Getting It Down: Crafting the Short Story
Summer
Date(s)
Jun 22—Aug 28
10 weeks
Drop By
Jun 25
3 Units
Fees
$795
Limit
17
Closed
Do your story ideas flee the moment you put pen to paper? Does your inspiration desert you at the sight of the blinking cursor? This course is designed to help writers of all levels learn strategies for that most basic element of writing: getting words on the page. We will explore ways to move beyond the urgency of inspiration to crafting a complete and compelling short story. For the first few weeks, we will focus on making beginnings approachable and on forming a writing habit. Then we will look at how to use perspective, setting, character, and plot as lenses through which to see your ideas anew and as sources of momentum that can push you past page one. We will read an anthology—The New Granta Book of the American Short Story—as well as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. By the second half of the course, we will develop our ideas into short stories and workshop them with an eye toward whether the piece is achieving what we intended and on ways to bring the next draft closer to that original inspiration.
This is an online course. For more information about the Online Writing Program, visit continuingstudies.stanford.edu/onlinewriting.
Lydia Fitzpatrick, Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Lydia Fitzpatrick’s work has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and Opium. She received the Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2012 Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan as well as a Hopwood Award and a Colby Fellowship.Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Lex Williford (Editor) and Michael Martone (Editor), The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, 2nd Edition (ISBN 978-1-4165-3227-9)
(Required) Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (ISBN 978-0385480017)
(Required) Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (ISBN 978-0385480017)