COURSE DESCRIPTION

You've pondered plot. You've dreamed up characters. The themes swirl in your head - but you haven't gotten very far into your novel. Either you've gotten bogged down, or you've only written enough to know that you're lost in a forest. If a poem is like a single match in the dark, and a short story is a cheery campfire, then a novel is a raging forest fire. All that smoke, all those flames, so much size and complexity. Rather than let yourself be intimidated, jump into the fire.

This 12-week course is designed for novice novelists eager to launch into or continue a project but who need help with structure, plot, narrative, POV, and the tricks not only for constructing a novel, but also for ways to navigate the immensity of such a long work. Using various craft handouts and the work of master writers, we'll examine issues of plot, character, style, tone, voice, perspective choices, and more. We'll also discuss the history of the novel and how writers of various literary styles and genres approach the work with specific types of audiences in mind. Two master novelists will come in to talk with us as well.

The instructor will help you sort out whether you work best as a "Blank-Pager," an "Outliner," or something in between. We'll read students' work and apply what we learn about technique and craft. Using in-class writing exercises, discussion of student manuscripts, presentations, and discussion, you will be inspired and motivated to fire up your novel so that you can make it from beginning to end.

Class time will be divided between presentation, discussion, and review of a novel by a master writer (35%), writing exercises (15%), and sharing/critiquing student writing (50%).

"Your first draft is an exploration. You invent characters and you wonder what they'll do. You watch them, and they surprise you, delight you, maybe they shock you. You gather information, do research, generate scenes. You write it all down with a temporary disregard for logic, transitions, and grammatical conventions. In the process, you learn that the story you set out to write is not so interesting as the one that has emerged on the page. The purpose of exploration is discover, and what you discover in writing that first draft are character, structure, plot, theme, tone, setting. In short, you begin to discover what it is you have to say about what it is you're writing about." ~John Dufresne in The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction