We shall be looking at a number of matters relevant to the reading and writing of short fiction, focusing on four important elements: the places in which our stories are set, the characters inhabiting those fictional spaces, and the ways in which those characters define themselves through their words and through their actions. It’s important to bear in mind that neither in the process of writing nor in the act of reading do we normally separate out these elements, but it can be very useful to subject
them – as we shall be doing here – to detailed individual examination. We shall begin by analysing excerpts from published fiction in which location and character play a particularly important part.
The location of a narrative may be foregrounded or it may be less obviously present, but there are few, if any, fictional narratives in which location is unimportant. Working partly through memory and partly through the exercise of the imagination, we shall think about our own attitudes to place and about ways of rendering our fictional locations.
We shall then move on to consider the ways in which character is represented in fiction. Simple description of character, though occasionally necessary, can sometimes seem unsophisticated by comparison with more oblique methods of representation. How do our characters speak and act? Do they speak and act in precisely the same way in all situations, or do they behave differently in different contexts or in the presence of different interlocutors? We shall have something to say here about first-person narratives, as well as about the dialogue that serves both to define character and impart energy to a narrative. For most of the course the primary focus will be the students’ own writing, produced between sessions, and examined by the group during those sessions.
