ENG820 Fiction Workshop – Spring 2009

Perry Glasser

MH 241

978-542-7032

Office Hours: Thursday 4:00 – 4:30

Catalog Description

ENG820 Fiction Workshop 3 Credits

A workshop course concentrating on the short stories and novels-in-progress of the participants. Workshop members read and critique one another’s fiction and also keep a writer’s journal. Topics include how to publish.

Policies

This syllabus/plan is subject to change with the needs of the instructor (that's me) and the students (that's you). Let's be flexible.

Special Provisions: Salem State College is committed to providing equal access to the educational experience for all students in compliance with Section 504 of The Rehabilitation Act and The Americans with Disabilities Act. Any student who has a documented disability requiring an accommodation, aid or adjustment should speak with me privately. Students with Disabilities who have not previously done so should provide documentation to and schedule an appointment with the Office for Students with Disabilities and obtain appropriate services.

Assignments: If you are unable to complete any reading or project, avoid embarrassment by informing me well in advance. If this becomes ordinary behavior, expect academic consequences.

·  Written assignments will not be accepted late.

·  Extensions of due dates will never be granted retroactively.

Plagiarism and Dishonest Scholarship: Students who present work not their own will be dismissed from class with a grade of F and may be dismissed from the College.

Assessment:

70% / works of fiction — see the Fiction Grading Rubric. # determined by enrollment
20% / quantity and quality of collaborative comment
10% / final self-critical essay; 1,000 words

Goals

§  Students will learn to analyze their own and other students fiction.

§  Students will learn the vocabulary of fiction analysis.

§  Students will engage the artistic process of fiction writing.

Course Description

The Workshop

A fiction writing workshop is a studio course. There are no required texts, other than the work students create and read for each other. In in a workshop, the teacher works as a facilitator, not as an editor.

A writing workshop is also a rare social contract. Student A exhibits her work to all of us and we are obliged to be tactful and critical. Most of us lack opportunities to find readers willing and able to do that. In fact, we likely have hordes of readers who will tell us we are terrific, but chances are they know little of the demons with which we struggle and, even if they did, they might be reluctant to tell us the work is wanting.

As with all arts, a body of theory is a handy thing to have mastered, but theories of fiction writing and what constitutes effective story-telling are idiosyncratic. That’s why writing is an art. If story-telling were a science, in the same way hydrogen can always be bonded to oxygen to create water, the elements of story-telling could be reduced to reproducible principles that always resulted in an effective story. Fiction writing is not chemistry.

Alas, fiction writing defeats linear or developmental teaching models. One could teach Characterization on Monday, Setting on Tuesday, Plot on Wednesday, and Structure on Thursday, but chances are that no one in the class will on Friday produce Moby Dick. The fact is that each element of writing is profoundly affected by the others, and so the student writer groping her way through a first person narrative can be expected to make the happy discovery that the narrative structure must now be varied to something not quite chronological, and that her original notion of how the setting would interact with character must also be changed, but this unfortunately makes the initial scene and dialogue nonsense because it reduces the protagonist to the intelligence of a plant.

Worse, we will talk about such elements as if they are isolated and subject to discreet changes; they are not. Remember, if it were easy, everyone would do it.

Assessment

Graduate students might reasonably ask how an idiosyncratic art may be assessed and against what standard.

In the Fiction Grading Rubric, you’ll find two key assessment concepts.

§  work appropriate to an adult, educated audience

§  incorporation of concepts taught

Note we are not measuring student work against a standard of “publishability” but as matters of individual growth and intention.

As a teacher, the challenges of workshop facilitation are to teach opportunistically. All of you will be privy to my comments to each of you. There are lessons to be learned from every story, lessons from me and lessons from your student readers. If five student readers comment that the characterization of the protagonist seems flat and predictable, there is a fair chance they have a point. After the workshop round and the threaded discussion about flat vs. round characters and how they may be achieved, it’s reasonable to assess ALL students’ efforts at creating rounded protagonists.

Process

Since submission schedules depend upon enrollment, they will be posted shortly after class begins. Our first 3 – 4 weeks will be devoted to exercises and teory: after that, all student work, 2 – 3 works per workshop.