Dr. Martin 3 credits

Each student will workshop at least two pieces of fiction in this class—stories or chapters of longer works—and do many creative writing exercises meant to steer your work into promising directions. The exercises are taken from our text, The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction by John Dufresne, which we will read and question. In our discussions we will explore the underlying architecture of stories and find constructive ways to make them better through revision. “The first quality of good storytelling,” according to John Gardner, “is storytelling….You are trying to create a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind and that dream is broken by bad technique.” You may, in fact, be trying to create something quite different from what Gardner claims a “good” story should be, so we will try to discuss your work in light of your apparent goals. And it may turn out that your drafts are not marred by “bad” technique. But certainly it is true for most writers that revision is an essential part of the process of discovery. “It’s one of the things writing students don’t understand,” Elizabeth Hardwick claims. “They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don’t understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.”

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