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Workshop Descriptions & Instructors
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Gordon Mennenga Writing Fiction For Literary Magazines Writing Wild: Exercises In Fictional Voice Beginning The Novel
Writing Fiction For Literary Magazines You’ve just finished a short story. It’s the best story you’ve ever written and you want to publish it. Where should you send it? Tin House, Glimmer Train, Blue Mesa Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Zoetrope—the list of fine literary magazines goes on and on. Many fiction writers scout the literary magazines trying to answer one question: what do the editors want in a short story? The simple answer is “a well-written story.” But let’s face it, some magazine editors favor “blue collar” stories that are well-written, while other editors prefer stories built on “landscape and metaphor” or “cityscapes” or experimental stories about women or long psychological stories. You’ve consulted Writer’s Market and various web sites. The guessing game goes on. This workshop is for you. We will begin with an analysis of each workshop member’s short story. We’ll assume that each story is a finished draft, but there will be time for revision. Then we will analyze a number of literary magazines. Our goal will be to match the story with a literary magazine without writing for a specific magazine. We’ll finish by reviewing our collective wisdom and putting a story in the mail. Writing Wild: Exercises In Fictional Voice What do Dan Chaon, Lorrie Moore, Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver, ZZ Packer and Elizabeth Crane have in common? The answer is voice, that certain wild energy readers crave. You can read the first page of a story by any of these writers and know without a doubt who wrote it. The idea of voice is a mysterious combination of writer and character. Voice is the sound of the storyteller; it’s what is in the air and on the page, a combination of speech rhythms, diction, attitude and perception. Barry Hannah said that “of all the qualities, voice is the most unteachable and the closest to magic, a sort of natural music in the head.” This workshop will focus on a number of short exercises written over the weekend to better define voice and encourage writers to locate the unexplored “natural music” of their own voice. We’ll let you know what we hear and suggest ways to shape your voice. If you’ve read your fiction aloud, you have some idea of how you sound, of how your characters sound, and of how maintaining that voice can hold a story together. We’ll invent voices and let them loose: ragged voices, calm voices, charming voices, distant voices, nurse voices, cowboy voices, burglar voices, bold voices, smart voices, foolish voices—and your voice. What an amazing motley chorus we’ll make! Beginning The Novel Think of your favorite contemporary novel: The Lovely Bones, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Peace Like a River, The Bean Trees, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The God of Small Things. Think of how that novel might have started: a dream, a memory, an image, a crisis, a letter, an obsession, a scrap of gossip. No doubt the novelist did a lot of pacing or smoking or eating or praying or crying or laughing or planning or cutting and pasting. But the words got on the page; they added up to a narrative that made sense and carried the reader into a new world. The novelist started out, got lost, found a way out, doubled back, asked for directions, moved on—and somehow arrived at THE END. This workshop will concentrate on the first words, sentences and pages of a novel. We will discuss a number of first pages from successful novels. Each workshop participant will be expected to bring the first chapter (15 pages is plenty) of a (however humble) novel-in-progress. We’ll revise and discover. Our discussion will focus on the beginnings of things: character, voice, language, setting and plot, when and where to revise, how and what to plan, how to get inside of the story and live the life of the novel. This workshop offers a substantial beginning, one foot in the water. Biography
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by Instructor Sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education Last updated on June 27, 2008 |
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