Write a Challenging Amount of Fiction With Me This Spring
at Fractal University
This post is to let you know about a class I’ve been working on: a fiction-writing class I’ll be hosting and participating in this spring in NYC. Here’s the link with all relevant information. The deadline to apply is January 8. The application is short—it does ask you to submit a brief writing sample.
That’s mainly because the class involves doing an ambitious amount of writing: a story (or novel chapter) a week.
Here’s a bit of the description:
This is a course about writing enjoyably and telling great stories. It starts from the suspicion that those two things could be connected.
Our primary aims will be:
to develop strength and vision as writers;
to foster a vibrant and happy community of practice;
to delight, terrify, and bewilder one another with the figments of our imaginations.
There are three main ways this class will differ from (and perhaps complement) the traditional university or grad school creative writing workshop.
1. Strong focus on generation & process (as opposed to evaluation & revision)
Most workshops ask students to submit their work three or four times over the course of the semester, and spend the majority of class time engaged in critiquing that work. An alien anthropologist observing such a course could get the impression that students were being trained in the critical evaluation of stories, rather than in storytelling itself.
Critiques can be essential, of course, at the right time and from the right collaborator. But since most stories demand multiple, sometimes radical revisions, workshop critiques often come unhelpfully early in the iterative process, exposing the writer to doubts before they quite know what they’re making. The expectation of early critique can subtly disincentivize the stuff we really want to see: stories that startle us, that venture into the unknown, that reveal the world anew or explore morally challenging situations.
In other words, a lot of writing education implicitly discourages mistakes—when what many writers would benefit from, especially in the drafting stage, is to be supported in making more.
In this class, we will encourage and support mistake-making as much as possible, by doing quite a lot of writing together, and by discussing it in a form that focuses on the creative process more than critique.
(The rest, again, is here.)
The course is fairly experimental. It grew out of thinking about the kind of class I really want to be in, as I go back to fiction-writing after a long break. I’m very excited for it.
I’m offering it through, and with the significant help of, Fractal University, a new community education project, connected with the Fractal community here in Brooklyn. Fractal University feels like the kind of community educational project I’ve been looking for without knowing it—the semi-spontaneous but impressively well-organized emergence of a “school” where friends and potential friends are sharing skills, teaching what they want to learn, and collaborating on real-world projects. The spring semester has a slate of courses, some of which will be of interest to readers of this blog.
If you don’t live in New York but want to learn stuff in this way, maybe just start a school with your friends?
I aim to be posting more here soon. In the meantime, happy holidays, and see you in 2024.