3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course is primarily a workshop; students will each write and workshop two short stories. Additional shorter writing assignments will focus on character development and characterization. We will consider how writers create characters capable of surprise and contradiction, how we balance writing a person’s interior life with writing their external presentation, how characters’ competing desires can fuel plot or narrative tension, and how we might think about characterization as a way of exploring power dynamics between the people in a story. We’ll also read and discuss published work that succeeds in creating layered and memorable characters, including writing by Dawnie Walton, Jennifer Egan, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Nam Le, Ling Ma, Lauren Groff, Asali Solomon, and Alice Munro.