Short Story Writing

(EGL 123 W)

“When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.” —Vickie Karp

In this course we will leverage the power of truth, experience, and memory to energize our fiction and create compelling short stories. In the first half of the course, we will use weekly writing exercises to generate new ideas. We will study short stories by Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, and Russell Banks to learn how to make our characters come alive on the page. From these readings and exercises, we will develop our plots, heighten our conflicts, and strengthen our voices. The second half of the course will be devoted to workshop. Each student will submit a ten- to twenty-five-page short story that the group will constructively critique with an eye toward offering the writer a plan for revision. Fiction writers both experienced and new are welcome.

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Vanessa Hutchinson, Former Stegner Fellow

Vanessa Hutchinson lives in Brooklyn and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Dean’s Graduate Fellow. She got her start writing fiction after taking her first fiction course with Stanford Continuing Studies. Her work has appeared in New York Stories and Epoch. Her short story “Cyclone” was honored with a special mention in the Pushcart XXXIII Anthology.