Where does good fiction come from? And how do writers work with their material in ways that make it powerful and transcendent for a reader? Inspiration—from memory, experience or the expanses of the imagination—is only the starting point to your most interesting, unique storytelling. What follows is an intentional engagement with elements of fiction like point of view, place, plot, structure, and more. This class will take a look at these elements by studying the approaches of classic and contemporary fiction writers. We’ll also explore them through in-class writing prompts and short take-home assignments, and each student will have the chance to workshop a complete short story or novel excerpt with the whole group.
The Building Blocks of Storytelling: A Fiction Workshop
Dates: 8 Mondays, January 8 - February 26
Time: 7 - 9 pm
Instructor: Angela Pneuman
Ages: Adult
Maximum Enrollment: 9
Genre: Fiction
Price: $475
Angela Pneuman is the author of the novel Lay It on My Heart and the short story collection Home Remedies. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories (2004, 2012), Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and other literary magazines, and she is a contributor to The Believer, Salon, and The Rumpus. She currently teaches in Continuing Studies and the Online Writing Certificate program at Stanford, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and is the executive director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
More about Angela: http://www.angelapneuman.com