GROWING THE SHORT STORY

Weekly Class/Register

You want to write that stop-them-in-their-tracks short story? Let me tell you a secret. It's not the content that counts. It's HOW YOU TELL IT. By starting from the ground up, you will learn to tell a great story; a story that engages your reader sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page so that, in the end, they are changed by it.

YOU WILL:

  • Discover how to transform resonant personal experience into powerful story.

  • Develop your skills in creating rich and exciting language.

  • Practice the principles central to the craft of writing fiction: character development, voice, point of view, story line and final meaning.

  • Take risks with camera angle, linguistic texture, and story structure

COURSE SYLLABUS
  • WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION
    What's It All About?: Class Overview & Structure
    Awakening Perception: The Vitality of the Heart
    Remembering Incident
    Potent Words, Shimmering Images

  • WEEK 2: LOCATING STORY
    Seeing Story in the Familiar: Vignette to Story
    Versions: Angles of Incidence

  • WEEK 3: TRANSLATING TRUTH INTO FICTION
    Amazing Stories
    Is It a True Story?: Drama that Happened and Drama You Invent

  • WEEK 4: SHORT STORY AS GENRE
    Seeing Story in the Unfamiliar
    Whose Story Is It?: Narrative Points of View
    About Short Story

  • WEEK 5: CHARACTER: INVENTING THE TRUTH
    Biography: "Creative Wrong Memory" as a Source of Art Character + Situation = Momentum
    Sprouting Seeds: Developing Your Short Story

  • WEEK 6: FIRST PERSON: DEVELOPING CHARACTER OUT OF VOICE
    Hearing Voices: Speaking in Tongues
    Primary Colors of Story: Character, Obsession, Obstacle
    Understanding Your Characters Through Monologue

  • WEEK 7: THE PLOT THICKENS
    Personal Secrets
    Situation to Plot
    Developing Your Characters: Telling Details - Metaphor & Hard Facts

  • WEEK 8: DIALOGUE
    Loosening the Tongue: Writing a Scene in Dialogue Only
    Revealing Dialogue: Dialogue as Art, Not Talk
    Mainlining Your Story
    Getting Unstuck: Traveling Outside the Story to Get In

  • WEEK 9: LAUGHTER AND LUST
    Humor
    Sex
    Final Meaning


  • WEEK 10: DOWN TO THE WIRE
    Feedback/Critique
    Evaluation

 

WINTER SESSION
February 7 - Arpil 3, 2008
9 Thursday Evenings

 

Title: Ripe Fruit III
Growing the Short Story
Fee: $375
Deposit:  $100
Time 7:00 - 10:00 PM
Location: Greenhouse of the Imagination-San Francisco

SPACE IS LIMITED

CALL (415) 337-4369 OR
CLICK BELOW TO REGISTER

 


Ripe to Write? Contact Us!
        Phone:415-337-4369
Mailing address: P.O. Box 460475, S.F., CA 94146

website design by: Mauka Makai Web Services

copyright © Ripe Fruit Writing 2007
all rights reserved