This intermediate fiction-writing course emphasizes the analysis, production, and revision of original literary short stories - that is, those appropriate for study in a college creative writing course and/or for possible publication in literary journals. You will do exercises designed to help unearth ideas for stories and hone the basic elements of craft such as the use of scene and summary in plot, character development, dialogue, POV, and setting, as well as techniques for significant revision. In addition to recycling an older story, you will draft, workshop, and revise an original short story. To expand your understand of literary short stories and craft, we will read and analyze the published work of numerous authors.

This is a rigorous course intended for serious writers/students open to the hard work of discovering, deepening, and clarifying their fictional voices. As a reader, writer, teacher, and editor of literary fiction, I will encourage and even demand that you write such fiction for the purposes of this class. For me, literary fiction most often treats an action or event that might happen to real people in everyday life and traces it in a unique or extraordinary way. Its credibility is unquestionable. Because most genre fiction adheres to a plot formula and incorporates stock characters, it invites imitative writing. This course, on the other hand, promotes the adage of "Write what you know" (rather than what you can imitate), resulting in the careful development and articulation of original characters and the dramatization of their :"interesting trouble."