Key elements of craft, such as characterisation, setting and point of view, are as applicable to our understanding of long form narratives as they are for short fiction, although we will focus particularly on how these relate to the short story. We'll look at the setting of particular stories and consider the author’s responsibility for world-building, be that location, period, or mood-specific. We’ll think too about the characters’ relationships with their exterior worlds, and examine the way in which this might be internalised or act as a mirror of emotional experience.
We’ll also consider the voice of our characters and how this might extend, conflict with, or challenge our own authorial voice. We’ll think about the angle at which we came at the story – the perspective from which the fictional world is rendered.
Not everyone is writing for professional publication, but whoever your intended audience, the ‘real writing’, as they say, is in the re-writing of a piece, and we’ll conclude the course by thinking about this process – how to edit and re-draft your work to a more polished standard. We’ll consider the market for publishing short fiction and, finally, discuss ways in which you might approach disseminating your finished stories, which might be in literary journals, personal blogs, or simply for your family.
For most of the course the primary focus will be the students’ own writing, produced between sessions, and workshopped by the group during those sessions.
