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Explore the craft of longer fiction and how to meet its creative challenges. Each session includes a lecture on craft, supported by discussion of assigned readings and exercises to unlock the potential of your ideas. Learn how to develop characters, language, voice, pace, tone, theme and setting, and participate in a group critique of student work. Enrollment is limited.
Course Outline
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Course Objectives
- Gain a brief historical and structural overview of the novel.
- Produce an outline and four chapters of a novel.
- Develop the discipline of regular writing.
- Understand the importance of revision and develop the ability to revise based on feedback on your work.
- Develop critical skills for giving feedback to others so they can then apply it to their own work.
- Gain a strong sense of future direction for your writing.
What You Learn
- Finding your writing time and place
- Developing your novel's outline
- Defining your genre, novel's purpose, characters and their roles
- Setting, voice and point of view
- Plot and scenes
- Novel openings
- Building conflict, suspense and surprises
- Character arc and raising the stakes
- Climax and the final crisis
- Revising your draft
- Publication of your novel, including the marketplace, how to research potential agents or publishers for your novel and how to write a query letter targeted to a specific agent or publisher
How You Learn
- Reading assignments
- Lectures/modules
- Online classroom discussions
- Writing exercises
- Novel submissions (outline, first drafts and revision)
- Student critiques