This course will aim to foster the discipline necessary to write regularly, to elaborate on the elementary skills of fiction writing (with a special emphasis on metaphor, parable, and allegory) and on the techniques necessary to design a completed story. We will practice as well, through the reading of exemplary stories and fellow students' work, the critical reading skills necessary for any aspiring writer. If you can't read carefully, you can't write carefully; if you can't help solve another author's fictional problems, you're unlikely to be capable of solving your own. Fiction writing is a serious way of knowing the world, and no time will be spent on analyzing the strictly commercial marketplace, or on how one might reduplicate fiction whose only function is the passing of time or the making of money. An intensive course, for committed students only.

Prerequisites:

ENGL 283 & ENGL 284