Spring 2014 : African American Studies 157 Creative Writing: The Short Story

This course is a fiction-writing workshop in which we will confront some of the challenges of writing short fiction.   In the first portion of the course, we’ll read and analyze selected short works in order to examine the styles and strategies employed by various writers, and we’ll experiment with various in-class writing exercises that emphasize basic skills in writing description, dialogue, characters, and plot.  For the rest of the semester, we’ll discuss student work in class.  Each student will write two 15-20 page stories, which the class will discuss and critique.  At least one story will be substantially revised for the final.  The members of the class will provide written constructive critiques for each piece, and we’ll discuss together suggestions for solving problems that surface in the development of students’ stories.