The Final Drafts: Revising Your Short Fiction (ONLINE)

Class Description

You’ve written a draft of one or more stories. Now what? In this online course, you’ll learn techniques for polishing your stories. In particular, we’ll work in service of your story’s intention to locate its strengths and weaknesses, and create a plan for taking your draft to a place of completion. Emphasizing revision, this class will focus on a different craft topic each week-long session, including opening/ closing pages, character development, plot and structure, point of view, style, and sentence-level execution. Specifically, you’ll receive:

• A weekly craft lesson focusing on an aspect of fiction
• A weekly exercise to sharpen your revision skills
• Group workshopping of fiction written by you and your classmates
• Individualized critique of your fiction by the instructor
• Discussion of published stories and craft essays by authors such as Charles Baxter, Jane Smiley, Deborah Eisenberg, George Saunders, Ben Marcus, and Kirstin Valdez Quade.

By the end of this course, you’ll come away with tools for revising future short work, as well as a concrete plan for revising your current story draft. Although you will be asked to finish coursework for each week-long session by Tuesday evening, there will be no time-specific online meetings or webinars to attend.

This online class is classified as a workshop, which means students will form into cohorts to discuss each other's work weekly. Each student will also receive a comprehensive workshop from the whole class, plus the instructor, 2-3 times in the course of the class. Please expect to dedicate at least 5 hours a week to this class.