FICT 41 W: Good Things in Small Packages: the Art of the Short Story Instructor: Suzanne Rivecca

FICT 41 W: Good Things in Small Packages: The Art of the Short Story Instructor: Suzanne Rivecca A note from the instructor: In this course, you’ll turn in weekly exercises that correspond to the craft issues we’ll be exploring in our readings. I’ll give you feedback on each exercise, and you’ll be expected to provide feedback to at least one of your fellow classmates’ exercises per week (to make sure everyone gets classmate feedback, I’ll likely assign each person a “feedback partner” every week). Starting in Week 5, we’ll begin work-shopping students’ short stories as a class. I’ll deliver at least a full page of feedback, as well as line-edits and margin notes, to every student who submits a story; and I’ll also lead and steer the group discussion of the story in the forum. Everyone will be expected to deliver at least a half- page of feedback to the student whose story is up for discussion, and to participate in the conversational give-and-take taking place in the online forum. Depending on students’ receptivity to this idea and to time zone/schedule compatibility issues, we may hold a weekly hour-long interactive “chat session” once workshop starts. Grading: If you are taking this course for a grade, letter grades will be dependent on: timely submission of exercises and full fulfillment of classmate-feedback obligations; regular participation in online forum discussions of craft issues and readings; and the submission of a work of short fiction (of 10-25 pages in length). You’ll have the option to also submit to me a preliminary revision of your short story following your workshop session (submitting a revision is optional, and the people who are work-shopping later in the course may feel pressed for time to turn one in before the quarter ends. But I encourage you to take the opportunity to submit a revision, and will offer feedback to everyone who does so). Grade breakdown is as follows: Writing Exercises 30 % Full-length piece: 30 % Forum/Workshop Participation: 40% Week 1. What’s Your Story? “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.” –Eudora Welty For the first week of the course, we’ll get to know one another, and I’ll ask you to share some details about the stories you each want to tell—regardless of whether you’ve committed a word of them to paper yet. Our discussion this week will revolve around the question of goals. Obviously, our ultimate goal is to write a good story, one that’s complex and nuanced and moving and stimulating, but how do we get there? We’ll talk about how the full realization of a story’s emotional and artistic potential hinges on our ability, as writers, to surprise ourselves: not to write with a forgone conclusion or premeditated impact in mind, but to write toward the secret the story wants to tell us, its real reason for being. The deeper we immerse ourselves in the process, and the riskier we allow the process to feel, the more that reason will reveal itself. Readings: 1. LaPlante, Chapter 2: The Splendid Gift of Not Knowing, “Part I: Writing As Discovery” AND “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates 2. Butler, Chapter 2: The Zone; Chapter 5: A Writer Prepares Exercise: TBA Week 2: What Makes it A Story? So you have the germ of an idea for a story; maybe you have much of the plot mapped out; maybe you’re haunted by a compelling voice you can’t shake. And you start writing, and this nagging impetus unclenches and unfolds into a narrative. But what makes it a “story”—as opposed to a sketch, an essay, a polemic, an angry letter, a de-contextualized transcript from a talking head? Stories can take on many unconventional guises: they can be told in the form of letters and how-to manuals; their events can be scrambled out of chronological sequence; they can be rendered entirely without dialogue, or consist entirely of dialogue. Form alone doesn’t make a story; neither do character or voice alone. Often, a sense of movement—emotional and internal—is the key factor, because movement engenders suspense and closure, which in turn creates the impression that there’s a point to the story: not a moral, but some sense of light having been shed, of the unsaid having been articulated, of something urgent and necessary having been uncovered. It’s an intangible quality and can be irritatingly hard to explicitly define. But we’ve all had the experience of being left “unsatisfied” by a story, of thinking “That’s it? That’s all it amounts to?” Sometimes, of course, this sense of being left hanging is due to an unresolved plot. But often, it’s due to something less concrete and simple than the author having neglected to tie up loose ends. This week we’ll explore what makes a story a story, whether there are really any hard-and-fast rules, and, if so, how and when they can be broken. Readings: 1. La Plante, Chapter 4, The Shapely Story (stop after the Francine Prose piece) AND Chapter 12, “What’s This Creative Work Really About?” (Part 1 & 2) 2. Updike, “That in Aleppo Once…” by Vladimir Nabokov; “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick 3. Butler, Chapter 7: “The Bad Story,” and Appendix: “Open Arms” Exercise: TBA Week 3: Details & Immediacy: The Furnishings of a Story “Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists.” –Robert Olen Butler We’ve all heard the “show, don’t tell” maxim. Robert Olen Butler is a big proponent of the “show” school, waging war on abstraction and generalization, underscoring the importance of sensual immersion, of conjuring up a “dream world.” However, “showing” doesn’t mean all exposition or back-story undermines dramatic tension, or that we’re not allowed to provide context or describe how a character’s feeling. The balance between “showing” and “telling” in any given story often depends on a writer’s singular voice, their choice of narrator, and their individual style. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, for example, is constantly deconstructing and analyzing his own psychological interiority in a way that seems very “tell-y.” But it’s the details he chooses to notice in his environment, and his feverishly hyper-articulate way of limning them, that end up revealing his character—almost in spite of his grandiose erudition, which is a smokescreen for things urgent and dark and unspoken. Sometimes a writer can “tell” in a way that actually allows him/her to “show.” This week we’ll discuss how to find that delicate balance, through use of detail and voice, and by choosing what to include and what to leave out. Readings: 1. LaPlante, Chapter 5, “Why You Need to Show and Tell,” Part 1 and Part 2 AND Chapter 3, “Details, Details,” Part 1. 2. Butler, Chapter 8, “The Anecdote Exercise” and Chapter 9, “The Written Exercise” 3. Updike, “Where I’m Calling From” by Raymond Carver; “Menesteung” by Alice Munro Exercise: TBA Week 4: Narrative Voice & Point of View: Who’s Telling, and What are They Showing? A couple weeks ago, we read about Robert Olen Butler’s “bad story,” his initial draft of “Open Arms.” In describing his revision process, he cites the story’s point of view and voice as having undergone a major transformation between the first and final drafts. Choosing a different perspective, and a different lens through which to dramatize the story’s conflict and events, was a key factor in Butler’s eventual ability to find the story’s meaning and reason for being: that elusive “secret” we alluded to in Week One. By re- calibrating his lens, he was able to elevate his material beyond the level of a detached, reportorial dispatch, and imbue it with real emotional resonance and immediacy. This week, we’ll chat with Jim Gavin, whose story “Costello,” published in The New Yorker in 2010, is told in an unforgettably singular and idiosyncratic voice. We’ll use “Costello” and this week’s other selections as jumping-off points to discuss how point-of-view and perspective can be dynamic tools for telling and showing. Readings: 1. Jim Gavin, “Costello” (to be emailed) 2. Updike, “I Want to Live!” by Thom Jones 3. La Plante, Chapter Six, “Who’s Telling This Story Anyway?” (Part 1 & 2) AND Chapter 7, “How Reliable is This Narrator?” (Part 1 & 2) Week 5: Workshop Begins: The Fine Art of Giving Feedback (And Taking It) We’re at the half-way mark, which means we’ll begin workshopping 2-3 student stories per week, while continuing to read about and discuss craft issues. This week, in preparation for beginning to offer one another written feedback, we’ll “eavesdrop” on a couple workshop transcripts from Butler’s book. Then we’ll integrate what we’ve discussed about voice, detail, showing/telling, shape, and perspective into our feedback on classmates’ stories. Readings: 1. Student Stories 2. Butler, Chapter 6, “Reading, Lit Crit, and the Workshop” AND Chapters 11 & 12: “My Impossibles” by Brandy Wilson and “My Summer in Vulcan” by Rita Mae Reese Week 6: Dialogue & Characters: Rendering Real People Dialogue is a workhorse: used the right way, it can act in the service of plot, of character development, of both internal and external movement. (Used the wrong way—as a tool of exposition or explanation—it can destroy a reader’s trust in a flash.) Dialogue crystallizes the whole aim and purpose of fiction: to depict reality in a way that’s viscerally recognizable and genuine, but never banal.

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