Fiction With Teeth - 6 week workshop led by Andrew Martin
What are we looking for in a great work of fiction? A strong voice, coherent characters, an engrossing story: yes, definitely, all of the above. But there’s also something ineffable in a memorable story or novel, a spark of the personal or a challenge to the literary status quo that transforms a good piece of writing into something that changes the reader and makesthem remember it for years afterward. How do we get there?
In this course, we’ll explore methods for discovering the angles and ideas that set our writing apart. The course is for writers of all levels, from beginners to more established practitioners, and we will spend plenty of time discussing fundamentals—dialogue, point of view, voice, tone. But we’ll also delve into elements of fiction that don’t often get talked about in traditional workshops. How do we transform lived experience into written narrative? How important is plot? Do characters really have to “change” for a story to be any good?
Ultimately, this class is about exploring the possibilities of fiction—coming with an open mind as to what a story or novel can and should be, and being willing to try new things in order to discover and develop your subjects and perspective as a writer.
Students will each submit a story or novel excerpt to be workshopped, twenty-five pages maximum per piece, over the six week course. In addition, there will be assignments each week of short readings by published writers which we’ll discuss before each workshop.
6 weeks - Tuesday 7pm -10pm, May 6th - June 10th, On Zoom
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, the story collection Cool for America, and the forthcoming novel Down Time. His work appears regularly in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, and his stories and essays have also been published in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, McSweeney's, The New York Times Book Review, and many other places. A graduate of the University of Montana's MFA program and Columbia University, he has taught writing at Tufts, the City College of New York, the Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's University and in the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University.