Focusing on the short story, we shall be exploring memory as one of the fiction-writer’s key resources, probing the nature of our recollections. How do we know whether our memories are accurate? If we accept that all memories are, in some sense, created fictions, what are the implications for the fiction-writer? What is the role of the imagination in translating our necessarily incomplete and often imprecise memories into vivid fictional form?
We shall also be examining the importance of research as a basis for fiction. Some fiction is deeply indebted to the historical record, while other works suggest careful research in a specialist field. Even works of fiction that seem to deal with matters readily available to anyone who lives life with an awareness of his/her surroundings may, at certain points, require research on the part of the author. We shall be examining the pleasures – and pitfalls – of research-based writing, and asking ourselves whether the success of a short story depends on its fidelity to the research that underpins it.
We shall begin with the fundamental question: what is the short story? Through dialogue and debate we shall explore the subject in broad terms before moving on to a close reading of specific examples from published works. Beyond this point, the primary focus will be the students’ own writing, produced between sessions, and examined by the group in the course of those sessions: participants will be invited to address, in practical terms, the recording of remembered detail and the imagination’s power to transform that detail, and will be invited to explore – again in practical terms – the nature and value of research; they will also be encouraged to create fictional narratives based on immediately observed detail.
