COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016
Course Title: Short Story Writing: Making Fiction Out Of Experience Course Code: FICT 57 W Instructor: Brenden Willey
PLEASE NOTE: Although the time commitment for this course is dependent upon one’s degree of participation, students should plan on investing four to six hours per week in order to participate at a substantial level.
A Note from the Instructor:
Write what you know, goes the familiar adage. Or perhaps you know Eudora Welty’s famous complication: “Write what you don’t know about what you know.” By writing what we know, we hope to give our fiction the complexity and richness of real life experience. But turning literal fact into narrative truth isn't just a question of proper recording. We have to exercise our powers of evocation and perception to give our experience the coherence of art. It is in this artful exercise that we may begin to discover “what we don’t know about what we know.” “You begin,” Andre Dubus says, “by writing about something that was painful to you, and then by the time you write the story, certain actions have changed because the characters become themselves and they’re no longer you.”
In this short story workshop, we will explore fiction that takes the made up and the real—and makes them fit. As readers, we may not need to know that Junot Diaz once had a job delivering pool tables in Edison, New Jersey, to enjoy the pleasures of the short story he made from the experience. But as writers, working with the stuff of our own lives, it can be inspiring to see how others have fashioned experience into literature. Thus, as we work on fiction of our own, we will read short works by famous authors, each of which was inspired from the author’s autobiography. These works will highlight the diverging possibilities for writing down our own paths, and will exemplify different approaches to writing what we know.
As this is a short story workshop, the course’s main goal is to help you generate a draft of a short story, and by giving you feedback and asking you to give feedback to others, to prepare you for the inevitable revision. Each student will complete a couple of short writing exercises to get warmed up, and will draft and workshop one new short story, 8–15 pages in length. By the end of the term, students should expect to sharpen their vision, expand their knowledge of the craft, and increase their capabilities to make stories as from the stuff of life.
Weeks 1–4 will focus on readings of exemplary texts and craft essays, three or four per week, and on responding to a couple of short writing prompts in weeks 1 and 2. (By weeks 3 and 4, you should be hard at work on the draft of your workshop manuscript.) On our discussion forum, you’ll post responses and deep insights to the exemplary stories and to your peers’ exercises. Weeks 5–10, we will
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650
COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016 workshop your stories, and may read a supplementary story or two. During these weeks, the writers up for workshop will collect our responses to their manuscripts, and our video gatherings will focus on giving each writer time to ask us questions about our responses to his or her draft. In week 10, we’ll share the ideas we’re excited about for revision.
There is no assigned textbook or anthology. Readings will be sourced from free texts online. Occasionally they will require free registration with a website, but no more than that. That said, I highly recommend tracking down and reading, as a useful accompaniment to our workshop, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction, by Stephen Koch.
This is an online course. For more information about the Online Writing Program, visit continuingstudies.stanford.
*Please see course page for full description and additional details.
Grade Options and Requirements:
No Grade Requested (NGR) o This is the default option. No work will be required; no credit shall be received; no proof of attendance can be provided.
Credit/No Credit (CR/NC) o Score will be determined by student attendance and participation. Credit is given at 70% completion of requirements.
Letter Grade (A, B, C, D, No Pass) o Please note that you will not receive graded work throughout the term, but you are welcome at any time to inquire about your standing in the course. . Workshop participation 45% (including workshop letters) . Workshop submission 40% (story or excerpt) . Writing exercises 15%
*Please Note: If you require proof that you completed a Continuing Studies course for any reason (for example, employer reimbursement), you must choose either the Letter Grade or Credit/No Credit option. Courses taken for NGR will not appear on official transcripts or grade reports.
A note on workshop letters, or “peer critiques”: One of the most valuable elements of a writing class is the opportunity to have your work seriously critiqued both by your instructor and your peers. The critiques you write will be as valuable as those
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650
COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016 you receive. You will engage, therefore, in the traditional workshop ritual of writing a short letter to the writer of each story up for workshop. Writing such letters encourages us to take the critical step of articulating and beginning to form fully our own personal literary philosophies. In other words, a good letter might benefit you more than it will benefit the writer of the draft you’re responding to. Make sure your letters are carefully thought-out, both critical and kind. It’s important to remember that we won’t be discussing polished stories but early drafts.
Tentative Weekly Outline:
Week One: Introductions
There is a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. —Flannery O’Connor
Reading Assignment James Agee, “Near a Church” Isaac Babel, “Crossing into Poland” (trans. by Walter Morison) Isaac Babel, “My First Goose” (trans. by Walter Morison)
Writing Prompt #1: Ode to an Object Unnamed This week I would like you to choose an object from your life—it can an object you currently possess, it can be an object from the past, whatever—that holds some special meaning for you, and I would like you to preserve it with words. Describe it, in other words. Try to give make the description convey the quality of your feelings toward the object. (And please make it in a object, i.e. a physical thing that exists in the world. Students before have written about, say, war, and were thereafter sad to hear that war was a concept, an abstraction, not an object—though a war will contain and be waged with all kinds of objects.) The last caveat is that you cannot name the object. Do no tell us what it is. We should know only from reading the description. So, again, please be sure you pick an actual object, and then be sure to describe it. Some students want to approach this as a riddle and describe everything but the object itself. Resist that temptation. And resist the temptation to write about a type of object. Write about one object that means something special to you. No more than a page in length.
Week Two: What is a story?
Writing is easy. All you have to do is put something exciting on every page. —Barry Hannah
Reading Assignment Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories”
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650
COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016
Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”
Writing Prompt #2 Write a short scene (about one page, and no more than two pages) in which two characters interact with or about the object you wrote about last week. Set the scene in a room is currently important to you, or was important to you at some point in your life.
Week Three: A Chain of Causal Events
A basic characteristic of all good art—all man-made works that are aesthetically interesting and lasting—is a concord of events and means, or form and function. —John Gardner
Reading Assignment John Barth, “Incremental Perturbation” James Baldwin, “The Rockpile” Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Writing Prompt #3 Describe, using the tropes of fiction, a small brief moment that you feel changed you or someone you know. Which tropes of the form you use may vary—the description may or may not include dialogue, for instance. Do not worry about describing or explaining the change itself. Just describe the details of the moment. Try to choose small moment, something less obvious or expected. Not your wedding, for instance. Or your parent’s death. Maybe, instead, the death of the pet chicken that made your aunt turn vegetarian. Or the moment you bought the shoes you wore to the interview. But in writing the details, keep in mind the change you know is coming, down the line.
Week Four: Not Simply a Lens
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. — James Joyce
Reading Assignment James Joyce, “Araby” James Joyce, “A Painful Case”
Writing Prompt #4 Write a short autobiographical passage using the first-person point of view, attempting to write as you think, and using your thoughts—your thoughts then, in the moment you describe, or your thoughts now as you write. Then take the same sequence and rewrite it in limited third with no interiority, finding ways through depiction and character action to convey whatever is lost in translation.
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650
COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016
Week Five: Scene vs. Summary
Form is necessity in a work of art. —Flannery O’Connor
Workshop: ______and ______
Reading Assignment CJ Hribal, “The Scene Beast Is Hungry” Peter Taylor, “A Wife of Nashville”
Writing Prompt #5
Week Six: Place
…the goodness—the worth—in the writer himself: place is where he has his roots, place is where he stands; in his experience out of which he writes, it provides the base of reference; in his work, the point of view. —Eudora Welty
Workshop: ______and ______
Reading Assignment Ehud Havazelet, “Chekhov and Form” Both Chekhov stories discussed in the essay: “A Journey by Cart”; “In Exile”
Writing Prompt #6 Write a one to two page (or longer) dramatic fragment—part of a longer scene maybe, or part of a story—using landscape, weather, objects of a particular place, etc., to intensify two characters, as well as the relationship between them. One character, having the power in the situation, might stand on top of a flight of stairs, while another with less power might stand at the bottom, and might try or succeeding in gaining the top. Or two characters interact in a kitchen: one character might look at the objects inside the kitchen, while the other looks at objects outside through the window.
Week Seven: On Language: “The Ear’s Mouth Must Move”
By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write. —William H. Gass
Workshop: ______and ______
Reading Assignment James Wood, “Language” Denis Johnson, “Emergency”
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650
COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016
Writing Prompt #7
Week Eight: A Second Look at Third-Person
One by one, million by million, every leaf in that part of the world was moved. —Agee
Workshop: ______and ______
Reading Assignment James Agee, excerpt from A Death in the Family
Writing Prompt #8 Write a passage containing two or more characters, using abrupt and radical—but thoroughly acceptable, a la Agee in this week’s excerpt—shifts from what Gardner calls the authorial-omniscient point of view to the third person subjective. In other words, attempt a passage, with two or more characters, written in the variable close third.
Week Nine: A Second Look at First-Person
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. —Alice Munro
Workshop: ______and ______
Reading Assignment Alice Munro, “What Is Real?” Alice Munro, “A Friend of My Youth”
Writing Prompt #9 Take a brief story you’ve heard anecdotally, as Munro has done here from a story a friend told her while they played a board game, and begin to sketch and flesh it out, using narrative techniques we’ve discussed this term as you need and as you see fit. Try to give us a couple of pages, not much more or less.
Week Ten: Revision
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others. —Virginia Woolf
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650
COURSE SYLLABUS Quarter: Fall 2016
—Henry James
Workshop: ______and ______
Reading Assignment Anne Lamott, “Bird by Bird”
Writing Prompt #10 Write the first line or first paragraph, or a paragraph description, of three stories that you want to write in the future, that you want to write soon, that you want to write next.
Please contact the Stanford Continuing Studies office with any questions 365 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA 94305 [email protected] 650-725-2650