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COURSE TEXTS: — Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life — Bernays, Anne and Pamela Painter. What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers — DeGrazia, Emilio. Seventeen Grams of Soul — Plan for 10-20 dollars in photocopying expenses throughout the semester COURSE DESCRIPTION: Stories are natural parts of our lives. Every day we tell them, hear them, and participate in creating them. In fact, stories are such a central part of human existence that important psychologists like Jerome Bruner and anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss have devoted their lives to understanding how stories form our cultures and identities. In this course, students will have the opportunity to hone their abilities as story-tellers, not in a natural sense, but in the precisely artificial sense that makes literary fiction an art. Students will work to create artistic fiction that is compelling for various reasons—nail-biting plots, characters with fascinating attributes, relationships readers can relate to, vivid imagery that captures the mind’s eye, or innovative (or exceptionally subtle) approaches to style. Students will work to captures both the fascinating particulars of the richly detailed world and also the general sense of significance we feel when someone else’s story represents our own experience, even in small ways. More than 50 % of the course will be spent in workshops of student fiction. The rest of the course will be spent writing exercises from the Bernays and Painter text—exercises designed to help you into the process of writing your own stories—or reading Anne Lamott’s insights on the importance of writing, or engaging the work of the three authors who will visit the class.
COURSE OBJECTIVES: — To complete original works of fiction that are compelling and formally polished. — To deeply explore the relationship between art and life — To further understanding of conventions of fiction, especially character and plot — To become more effective workshop participants
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