write a creative craft essay observe the different

For most writers the task of writing is a question of content. What is this paper about? Who is the audience? Who are the experts? How do I use sources? What do I want my reader to remember? These are all good things. Important things.  Essential things. But writing should be about more than just content, it should also be about the process. How do we do this thing called writing? What are the places where good writing happens? What environment helps me to become a better writer? Why am I writing? For many writers—especially students—writing loses something essential in the focus on content. It loses the element of play and experimentation that is essential to good writing and good thinking. There is a sudden absence in the process. A lack of curiosity; an edge of anticipation. The nudge that spurs a writer to create something unique and satisfying. Not just for a teacher, but for themselves.  This is what all students of writing should strive for. The need to engage in the process of writing, not just once or twice, but again and again and again, until you have explored something important and holy and true about yourself and the world around you. So write. Write about writing, about what makes you want to take the leap onto the page. Write an essay; a short one, just a page or two about what makes you want to write, and how your students can engage with ideas and the world around them. Let us know what the practice of writing means to you. Give the reader advice on how to write. What has worked for you? Describe it in beautiful, fully rendered, poetic detail. Flesh out the world of writing that we want all of our students to see and engage in. People say that writing matters, that art nourishes, and that expression can feed the soul. Get busy, start cooking, and serve us up your very best meal.

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Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies

In the classroom blog series, practical notes: writing a craft paper–karen babine.

Welcome to Practical Notes, a new series on In the Classroom, in which we address various practical aspects of the writing world. 

[Side note: this is one of the avenues that led to Assay’s creation in the first place. I knew this work––which I came to consider very important––was being written, but the only place I really knew where to find it was the Writer’s Chronicle, which had sparse nonfiction offerings.]

What’s the purpose of a craft paper? Why do I need to write one? Its purpose is to participate in the larger conversation of nonfiction by contributing a work of new ideas to the community. Your thesis is your contribution of original creative work and thus serves a different purpose as an extension of what is expected in graduate level work. A craft paper is not a literary analysis–its purpose it to look at an element of craft and analyze it across several texts, or to take a single text and analyze it across several craft elements.

I include this description in my syllabus, adapted from the wonderful Matt Bell several years ago:

Literary analysis is different than craft analysis: they can overlap, but they are meant to be distinct.  Craft analysis is designed to discover the specific ways a writer creates a certain literary element, such as tone or voice.  One can study the way tone affects a story, but that is a literary analysis of tone.  Studying the ways punctuation and sentencing create tone is a craft analysis.  Remember that you are reading these pieces as writers. Throughout your responses, use specific examples, relate the reading to your work in progress or other work we’ve studied, and add to the subject your own experience and aesthetics . Please also feel free to ask a few questions at the end of your critical response, for possible discussion in class or on Moodle. Your assignment is never to have merely read the text. The most obvious quality that unites the best writers in all the classes I’ve ever taught is that the best writers consistently come out of everything we read saying “I’ve never thought of this before” or “I now realize I have a lot to learn about this technique” or “I’m going to try and work harder at doing X, Y, and Z well” or “this gave me new ideas to explore”—while almost every time the weaker writers write their responses about how they didn’t learn anything from this, that everything in it was something they already knew, barely worth saying again. If innate talent exists at all, I believe that in the writers where it seems most fully realized it is perpetually accompanied by a willingness to remain a student of the work of others, to not see yourself as already complete in your knowledge and skills. Fostering such an attitude in yourself will maximize what you get out of this course, the readings, and our discussions.

We, as writers, need to value the texts in front of us in this way. And, I would argue, equally important to value underrepresented writers and texts. Instructors have a finite amount of syllabus space for readings––and you come to class, whether it is a low-res program or residential––and you’re likely already pairing writers and ideas in your head. A craft paper is a good place to do this, aside from program requirements.

This is a waste of time. I want to be working on my thesis. The craft paper is also a place of discomfort, writing in a different register than we’re used to. When we spent so much of our energy creating our own work, it’s tough to want to spend time on other writers. But the truth is that craft work like this is essential to our own creative work. These are the finger scales and training runs. Very few people sightread a sonata or run a marathon without training. We need to study the work in front of us so that when we go to our own page, we can intentionally craft our own page, rather than arriving there by accident.

A personal example: my new book just came out and it’s light years away from my comfort zone in form and content. So I read all the flash nonfiction I could get my hands on––and flash fiction and prose poetry––to find out what made it tick. I studied the poetic volta and started paying attention to turns in nonfiction. I found Rebecca McClanahan’s “Selected List of Literary Gear Shift Moves” on Essay Daily. I started to call what I was doing a micro-essay. Then I started reading short nonfiction books as mine took shape, from Julija Sukys’ Siberian Exile and her terrific craft piece on short books, “In Praise of Slim Volumes:  Big Book, Big Evil”  to read through the conversation my book would eventually be participating in. The basis of this work will be my craft talk for Augsburg’s low-res MFA residency in the summer. Work like this should never go into the void, no matter who is doing it.

Where to start? I have my students start off with a substantial proposal in the first week of the semester.

Most recently one of my students chose to study warrant in nature writing, the “so what” factor; another student working on a travel narrative in search of her family’s roots wanted to study quest narratives, as an extension of travel writing.  Each of these topics grew out of the student’s thesis work and was not separate from it. The work they did on their craft paper expanded their concepts that surrounded them and gave them a sense of the conversation already taking place.

That said, a craft paper should not simply be a personal exploration of a text because you’re working on something similar in your own thesis. This is a problem we often see in craft papers submitted to Assay : the engine for the craft paper is the writer him/herself struggling through how to write about *something* and that struggle is the point of the paper, not the analysis of craft. The personal link can be the stimulus, but it cannot be the entire spine of the paper. For myself, I want to see the writer’s brain on the page. Craft papers can be detached, or not, but as you can see in the following section, where I assign many different examples of craft papers, the personal exists at many different points on the spectrum of detached to entrenched. That said, the choice to use I or not will depend on what you’re doing, how you decide to do it, and the expectations of your particular instructor.

Next Steps: I assign several examples of craft papers to start a conversation about the many different ways there are to write craft papers. Yes, craft papers require different muscles, but there is no one right way to write them. This semester, I chose these:

• Bruce Ballenger, “The Narrative Logic of the Personal Essay” ( Writer’s Chronicle )
• Wendy Fontaine, “Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir”
• Kelly Harwood, “Then and Now: A Study of Time Control in ​Scott Russell Sanders’ “Under the Influence”
• Diana Wilson, “Laces in the Corset: Structures of Poetry and Prose that Bind the Lyric Essay”
• Emily W. Blacker, “Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays”
• Jen Soriano, “Multiplicity from the Margins: The Expansive Truth of Intersectional Form”

Then we discuss:

• What makes this a craft paper?
• How does the author dig into the craft itself––and how does the author make clear what her/his purpose is?
• How is the paper constructed? What is its structure?
• Where do you see the author’s ideas driving the work––and where does the author use primary textual examples to illuminate his/her ideas?
• Where do you see the author using secondary materials (other articles, other craft books, etc) to illuminate his/her ideas?

This isn’t a quiz––I don’t literally want them to point to where this is happening. I want them to engage with these readings so that we can determine the standards of a craft paper as they work towards putting together their own work. What can we learn about writing craft papers from these different examples?

Putting the Puzzle Together: The Research I require as part of the proposal process both a preliminary outline and a preliminary annotated bibliography, so I can see the direction the writer intends to take their craft paper and suggest ways to fill the cracks and holes I see. The main issues I have encountered include a lack of diversity among the primary texts and this is not acceptable to me in graduate level work, so if the reading list is primarily white or primarily male, I require revisions.

The secondary research is more difficult, simply because nonfiction as a whole remains undertheorized (one of the major reasons that I find craft papers and such so valuable). When I was doing my own PhD work, finding research on nonfiction texts was near to impossible. Students writing craft papers will also encounter this problem. I encourage students not only to dig through Assay and the Writer’s Chronicle , in addition to craft books. The introductions to various anthologies, as well as the introductions to Best American Essays , also are excellent places to look for secondary thinking. Project Muse has often been more successful a database than others. I also encourage looking for supplementary texts in the subgenres, whether it’s ISLE or New Hibernia Review .

The reality is that nonfiction writers who are writing craft papers must be creative in finding and extrapolating from secondary texts, because the work we have to draw on is thin. This also presents an excellent opportunity for our work beyond program requirements. You might do some research into race theory, or neurobiology, or cultural criticism to make your point.

Citations, etc. The Purdue OWL remains the best resource for MLA citations, both in text and Works Cited.

Final Thoughts: Where we often struggle with requirements like craft papers and comps is when we can’t see a value in it, except for the thing itself. Publication venues, like Assay and the Writer’s Chronicle, exist for craft work like this and it’s important to have this continuous influx of new ideas, new texts, and new applications. Nobody has put these ideas and texts together in this way before–and that makes it unique and valuable. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you are the particular expert on this subject. Writing analytical work, like a craft paper, doesn’t have to be boring–and it shouldn’t be–even if you never write another craft paper.

Karen Babine is Assay’s editor. She is the author of  All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions) and the award-winning Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota Press), winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction, finalist for the Midwest Book Award and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. Her work has appeared in such journals as Brevity, River Teeth, North American Review, Slag Glass City, Sweet , and her essays have twice been named Notables in Best American Essays . She lives in Minneapolis.

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Karen, this is one of the most deliciously HELPFUL pieces I’ve read in as long as I can remember. In my final semester of my low-residency MFA program, and I have bookmarked this page to refer to again and again. Thanks for helping me understand the challenges ahead.

Karen, thank you so much for taking the time to write this. I am just beginning to put together a craft paper for a final project and sorely needed some initial direction. This has clarified my thinking in so many ways and I am now eager to get started.

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• Craft Essays
• Teaching Resources

Flash Nonfiction and the Art Student: Sharing Tools to Explore How We Make Art

with a sample essay by Mariana Yanes Cabral __

The art students I teach at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) feel that this direct and honest practice is required when they write flash nonfiction. One student feels that this quality of honesty is best described as being transparent: “The shorter the writing, the fewer layers you have to hide behind. It can be daunting, but the simplicity is refreshing.” Just as in art, for this writing genre to succeed, meaning is reduced to its essence.

Flash nonfiction gives art students a way to explore the core of their work through concision, prompting them to search for ideas by connecting the lines of thinking, making, and living. They begin with seemingly ordinary moments—gazing at one’s hands, drawing in a sketchbook, walking with friends in the mountains, traveling with Dad on an interstate highway—then integrate these progressive lines into flash pieces that reflect upon who they are as artists.

At MassArt, we experiment with this literary art form in the annual gallery show Why I Write. Why I Create. On large 30”x 40” banners, students express in 350 words or less their process of creating. They then pair their written response with an image of their art. They journey through their imaginations to provide intimate portrayals of the courage it takes to deliver truths through art. Memories, words, and images begin to mingle. A new understanding unfolds from the ancient wisdom: The heart recognizes what the mind cannot know.

These art students use their subjective observation skills to interpret their personal experiences, emotions, and aesthetics. One student observed this about the flash nonfiction responses in the gallery show: “All the writing in this show talks about the evolution of self—how they thought they saw themselves and how this thought transpired into the true essence of who they are. It feels like the change is happening while you are reading.”

When I ask art students what it feels like to write flash nonfiction, some say it is like sprinting. Words may come in short spurts. In sprinting, the runner eliminates unnecessary movements. In visual storytelling, it is essential to leave out any details that are not vital. An illustrator, for example, who wishes to tell a story in a single frame, synthesizes larger experiences in life with lines drawn to represent small moments. The skill of omission is key. In the classroom, we first study omission using John McPhee’s essay, “ Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out ,” in The New Yorker (2015) where he reflects on how he learned to consider what details to exclude to focus a story. Then we expand this discussion by considering unhelpful uses of the omission; that is, missing elements that keep artists from delivering truths through art. From the essay collection Creating Nonfiction : Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers , we study Cheryl Strayed’s observations on knowing, refusing to know, and the role of truth-telling in her essay “ Kestral Avenue .” And we investigate the nature of implicit biases revealed by what is omitted in Faith Adiele’s essay “How to Make Sense of the Postcolonial Nation-State: A Definition Essay Using Material Lifted Almost Entirely from the Internet as Annotated by the Author, Herself a Nigerian American.” Understanding these many sides of omission strengthens art students’ ability to show unseen moments in unexpected ways.

No discussion on omission is complete until we consider negative space—the shape of the empty space (or white space) once the first line is drawn on the page. In graphic essays, the white space between the panels serves to prolong the opening of the reader’s perception. In flash nonfiction, white space may be represented by breaks that leave room for the reader to imagine the larger context for the story. For example, the first sentence of an essay that invites the reader’s attention may be followed by a paragraph break. This break can highlight the shape of the next paragraph, a container designed to move the reader quickly into challenging material, such as the experience of a young person translating for her family as they navigate the complexities of U.S. culture.

Art students find a number of parallel practices between their studio work and flash nonfiction: focusing on emotional truths, using the spontaneity of words in sprint-like action, observing parts while perceiving the whole, making leaps of understanding using white space, and more. I have success teaching these skills with the textbook  The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers , which includes a sample essay at the end of each section. I’ll do the same by concluding this craft discussion with an essay by Mariana Yanes Cabral , from the 2017 student gallery show Why I Write. Why I Create :

I am a translator who has found purpose through necessity.

Translation is supposed to be an innocuous act, but every word becomes a bomb in a battlefield. I am aware of the lives I’m responsible for when I am appointed as both general and messenger of my consanguineous army. My body trembles with the incredible burden, and I predict only disaster. A slip of the tongue here, a missed phrase there, and a bill goes unpaid. A child warily awaits a pick-up that never happens. A diagnosis falls on illiterate ears. Each mistake is an eaten ration, is a lost friend, is a civilian death. Translation then becomes precise, it becomes surgery, and it becomes my family’s last line of defense.

Thirteen years old, and my word is gospel.

“What does it say?” my mother asks, her gaze blank on a school newsletter, a medical exam, an eviction notice. My tongue quivers and stumbles between one, two, one-and-a-half parlances with the clumsiness of a native. I translate the text, and in the spaces between I translate the burden of knowledge. I translate the anxiety between me and words, for words are frequential slurry seeping through my cortexial carpet. I stitch together the organic fragments of a language I call home through the galvanized steel of clinical palaver, and gurgle the disjointed syntax that results. Again, and again, and again.

Twenty-four years old, and my word is practice.

My repertoire expands. I translate the past to the present. I take in and translate the language of space—the space between objects, the space between words, the space between synapses. I translate the furious, ugly noise that you, and I, and we choose to drown out, and whisper it in silence. I translate blood and anguish with flowers and greeting cards. I translate with the knowledge that my translations can foster and destroy. I translate with the knowledge that there are many who wish to remain lost in translation.

I revel in the knowledge that my translations are my most powerful apparatus.

Mariana Yanes Cabral is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the eldest of three children in a multi-national household, the Brazilian-American artist lives and works in Boston. Cabral’s work explores nostalgia, introspection, race and politics with both traditional and digital media.

Jeanette Luise Eberhardy , Ph.D., MFA, is a teacher, writer, and storyteller. Eberhardy serves as program coordinator, first year writing and assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. At the 17 th Annual Women’s International Conference in Berlin, Eberhardy gave the opening address Your Story Matters to 800 women business leaders. She has delivered her Storyforth seminars in Egypt, Sweden, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and the U.S. Eberhardy is working on the book Why I Write. Why I Create: Global art students show how they express themselves. She can be reached at WivInc.com.

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Thomas Dodson | Writer

Not One Window, But a Million: Resources for Fiction Craft

Introduction.

T his essay examines resources for the study of the craft of fiction writing, focusing on works of interest to teachers and students of creative writing and to librarians seeking to develop collections to support creative writing courses. Though these courses are often taught in English departments, the needs of writers differ from those of literature students. Craft guides reflect this difference, for although a craft analysis may carefully examine a literary work, its aim is generally not to place that text in the context of a historical period or artistic movement, to uncover its ideological investments, or to develop interpretations through critical approaches derived from poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, materialist, or feminist theory.

The purpose of a craft analysis is, as John Gardner explains in On Becoming a Novelist , to help the student “read to see how effects are achieved, how things are done, sometimes reflecting on what [they] would have done in the same situation and on whether [their] way would have been better or worse, and why” (45). Studying craft texts helps the novice student to learn the concepts and language of fiction writing from a practitioner’s point of view and, hopefully, to make more informed aesthetic choices in their own writing. Focused as it is on the craft of literary fiction, the scope of this essay excludes many fine works of criticism, craft books focused on the conventions of other genres (e.g., the romance novel), and those purporting to offer formulas for commercial success.

Craft books come in many forms. Some share generic features with self-help books, offering encouragement and exercises, together with advice about how to deal with the psychological travails of the writing life: writer’s block, envy, self-doubt, fear of rejection, and so on. There are creative writing textbooks and less formally organized books that consider several of the formal elements of fiction writing at once—point of view, characterization, narrative structure, etc.—and others that examine only one. There are canonical texts, such as E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Henry James’s prefaces to his works, and there are modern classics such as Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and the essays collected in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House . There are also those eminently practical books such as Brian Shawver’s The Language of Fiction , which instruct the writer in fiction mechanics such as how to choose among the different conventions for communicating characters’ inner thoughts and how to punctuate dialogue when they speak aloud. There are online magazines offering regular writing prompts, podcasts, and self-guided video courses with lessons by renown writers.

Finally, there are works that critique traditional ideas about craft, the status of canonized works, and standard approaches to the teaching of writing. Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode explores narrative structure, presenting a number of alternatives to timeworn forms such as the Freytag triangle and three-act structure wherein “a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides,” an arguably gendered approach to the art of storytelling: “But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?” (6). Other works make important points about the non-neutrality of craft and the workshop model, their implicit investment in whiteness. In Craft in the Real World , Mathew Salesses considers the cultural specificity of writing advice too often presented as universal, but which actually teaches writers to tailor their work to a white, heterosexual audience. David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey examines how white writers and writing teachers consistently dismiss or disavow the role of race and politics in their work and that of their students. And in her book The Anti-Racist Workshop , Felicia Rose Chavez offers a bold vision for a critical, anti-racist writing pedagogy, one that does not silence the writer of color, but rather seeks to empower them.

Instructors seeking a single, comprehensive book suitable for classroom use should consider The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing , Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , and Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs (LaPlante; Burroway et al.; Creating Fiction ). Each covers the fundamental elements of fiction in sections dedicated to point of view, plot and structure, character, and revision.

The first of these, Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story , covers both fiction and creative nonfiction in fourteen clearly constructed chapters. Before going into detail, each chapter offers an overview of a given element (e.g., dialogue) together with working definitions of terms. Chapters conclude with relevant exercises (often with examples of student work created in response to the prompts) followed by short, illustrative works by professional writers.

Laplante’s book also offers straightforward answers to some of the subtler issues most likely to trouble the novice writer. How, for example, does one write a character-driven story in which things actually happen? The writer should build a plot, LaPlante advises, based on one “simple question: What can I do to my character to unsettle or move or stress or stretch him or her in some way?” (381). That situation will, of course, be different for every character.

Laplante also clears up the common confusion around the notion of an “unreliable narrator.” A narrator that offers us a distorted account—or flat-out lies to us—will nevertheless be expected to tell the truth about some things. “The convention,” she explains, “is that showing, or scene, is reliable. It’s the telling, or narrative, that is potentially unreliable” (LaPlante 321). According to this convention, “if a physical action is described or words in quotation marks are present in a scene—even by a very unreliable first person narrator—we are supposed to believe them” (LaPlante 322). A writer is free to break this convention, but a reader left without some way to anchor themself in the reality of the narrative (as opposed to its interpretation by a narrator) may well abandon the story in frustration before reaching its conclusion.

First published by Little, Brown in 1982, Writing Fiction was written to fill a growing need for textbooks for college-level creative writing courses (Burroway et al.). Now in its tenth edition, Burroway’s book still admirably fulfills its original purpose. In the interest of keeping the book affordable, this edition no longer includes an anthology of stories. Instead, a list of ten recommended texts are included at the end of each chapter, followed by writing prompts. Writing Fiction does, however, contain many illustrative passages from stories and novels; due to the relative currency of its revision and publication (2019 as opposed to 2010 for LaPlante’s text), these examples are drawn not only from long-canonized writers such as Raymond Carver, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O’Connor, but also newer voices such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, and Ottessa Moshfegh.

Creating Fiction consists of twenty-three essays commissioned by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs ( awp ). Although structured as a collection rather than a textbook, its essays, written by authors renown for both their fiction and teaching (John Barth, Charles Baxter, Lan Samantha Chang), cover the key elements of fiction. Each piece concludes with a set of exercises for personal or classroom use. The essays on point of view are especially strong (particularly the discussions of third person perspective by Valerie Miner and Lynna Williams) as is Robin Helmly’s consideration of unlikeable or “unrelatable” characters in “Sympathy for the Devil: What to Do About Difficult Characters.” Forty additional exercises are provided at the end of the book.

Writing teachers looking for an alternative text that will appeal to readers of science fiction and fantasy should consider Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (VanderMeer). Whereas most books on literary writing assume realism as the default, Wonderbook places speculative fiction at its center. VanderMeer’s advice about craft elements such as characterization and structure, however, are as relevant to the writer hoping to publish a short story in The New Yorker as one intending to write a Hugo-award-winning fantasy novel. It also includes material of special interest to speculative writers, such as a chapter dedicated to world-building. The book is well-designed, with colorful illustrations and charts; it also includes a number of mini-essays by accomplished speculative writers such as Neil Gaiman, Catherine M. Valente, and Charles Yu. It concludes with additional writing exercises.

The Writing Life

F or thirty years, many aspiring authors have begun their writing practice with guidance and encouragement from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within . Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Goldberg’s method emphasizes unconscious processes over logic and rumination, spontaneity over planning, process over product, and messiness (in art and life) over attempts at perfection. She suggests to the beginning writer a practice of regular, timed exercises, during which the most important instruction is to “keep your hand moving,” resisting any impulse to impose order, conform to the rules of grammar, turn away from confusing or painful topics, or otherwise exert conscious control over the writing process (Goldberg 8).

For those put off by Goldberg’s free-spirited zaniness, there is also Anne Lamott’s sharp-tongued, straight-talking Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life . Lamott’s guide contains much of the now-standard advice: schedule a daily time to write and stick to it, break down intimidating tasks into small assignments (set the goal of writing a description or a scene rather than a whole story or chapter), and give yourself permission to write “shitty first drafts” (20). Lamott offers instructions on characters—they should be flawed (perfect people are dull); plot—it should be driven by and reveal character; and dialogue—read it to yourself out loud, ensure your characters don’t all sound alike, and don’t exhaust and alienate your reader with passages written in dialect. In later sections, she considers the psychological and ethical challenges writers must face and prepares the novice for experiences such as participating in writing groups and getting published.

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is more poetic and aphoristic, mixing stories from her life with anecdotes about the habits of other writers. (Dante and Emerson, she reports, both took long walks for inspiration.) She delivers most of her writing advice through metaphors. Dillard warns that a work-in-progress, if neglected, may “become feral…a lion you cage in your study.” In her world, a line of words becomes a fiber optic cable: “Flexible as wire; it illumines the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm” (Dillard 52, 32).

In the first chapter of Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing , Margaret Atwood provides a succinct account of her life, at least as far as college. She also considers what it meant to her to be a Canadian writer, one aware that her country’s literature was regarded as largely peripheral by the rest of the world. The rest of the book is an erudite and deeply considered reflection on “writing as an art” and “the writer as the inheritor and bearer of a set of social assumptions about art…” (Atwood 25). Atwood draws from classic works of literature to reflect on such issues as the persistence of the Romantic-era conception of the writer as a person possessing a “double nature” (the author of the work and the living person); the question of art’s purpose and utility; the moral and social responsibility of the literary artist for what they have written; and the uneasy relationship between art, money, and power (37, 102).

Many literary writers have benefitted from the encouragement and instruction contained in John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist . For the prospective writer unsure of their calling or of their ability to sustain a career writing novels, Gardner offers some principles for self-evaluation. A writer ought to have a love for language (but not so much that it gets in the way of their interest in telling a story), the ability to see the world in a fresh and original way, an interest in people not like themself, “a sense of life’s strangeness,” and a drive to work very hard for not much external reward (Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist 40). On Becoming a Novelist also offers sensible general advice about the value of formal education and mfa programs, and about the world of editors, agents, and publishing. Gardner’s book was, however, published nearly forty years ago. The reader would do well to look elsewhere for up-to-date information in these areas, at least regarding specifics.

Ernest Hemingway on Writing , edited by Larry W. Phillips, draws from a variety of sources—interviews, letters, journals. Individual passages are brief, but present Hemingway’s answers to just the kinds of questions novice writers are interested in. Is it better to write what you know or be guided by curiosity and imagination? “You ought to write, invent, out of what you know” (Hemingway 70). Who should I read? “The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers” (Hemingway 95). How much should I write each day? “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it” (Hemingway 42).

Fans of The Shining , Misery , and The Stand , may want to turn for writing advice to “the master of horror” himself, Stephen King. In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , King devotes the first section to the story of his writing life, from hand crafting comic books as a boy, to the car crash that nearly killed him while he was writing On Writing . Most of the treatment of writing craft comes in the latter sections, “Toolbox” and “On Writing.” The writer’s toolkit, King advises, ought to contain a good (though not necessarily fancy) vocabulary; a serviceable understanding of grammar; and a facility with making paragraphs, which King considers to be “the basic unit of writing” (134). His key prescription to the writer, however, is this: “read a lot, write a lot” (King 151). He’s not shy about putting a number to this injunction: strive to write two thousand words a day, he says, six or seven days a week.

Writers seeking some cues to kick-off these regular scribbling sessions and teachers in need of in-class exercises will appreciate collections like Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer , with ideas from revered authors such as Richard Bausch, Joyce Carol Oates, and Elizabeth McCracken. The writer in need of more prompts can find them in What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers and The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction (Bernays and Painter; Kiteley).

Many aspiring writers will also admit to needing some guidance in the “read a lot” arena. They’ll find a help in Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose. Prose argues that writers wishing to learn their craft ought to dedicate themselves to close readings of classic works of literature; she provides a list of “books to be read immediately” to help the reader on their way. Prose demonstrates her method with craft-based, sentence-by-sentence—sometimes word-by-word—analyses of passages from writers such as Chekhov, Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor. Most readers, however, will find Prose’s reliance on traditional ideas about literary genius, objective quality, and the timeless universality of canonical works by mostly white authors to be out-of-step with contemporary conversations about fiction.

Those seeking a more diverse set of literary models might well start with Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors , by Jewell Parker Rhodes. In addition to exercises, advice, and short stories by Black authors used to illustrate craft concepts, Rhodes’s guide to the writing life also includes a reading list of over one hundred books “historically significant to the development of African American fiction” (314). Rhodes encourages the reader to explore the particular storytelling resources offered by African American literature and culture, such as the richness of its “oral and folk legacy tradition” and its long engagement with themes of “literacy and liberty…unjust persecution, escape, and redemption, family survival despite slavery and discrimination, and migration from Africa, and ultimately, across America…” (262–263).

Bonnie Friedman’s Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life and Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer both focus on the psychological dimension of the writing process. Friedman addresses the two main varieties of writer’s block: the problem of perfectionism, “being afraid to touch the half-finished piece for fear of messing it up,” and the fear that one has nothing significant to say in the first place. She also talks the reader through concerns over writing about taboo and touchy subjects such as the body and living family members (17).

Becoming a Writer was originally published in 1934 and then fell out of print. Gardner, in his forward to the 1981 reissue, neatly sums up Brande’s thesis: “the root problems of the writer are personality problems…” (11). Instruction in craft and technique aren’t of much use, Brande argues, until more foundational, psychological issues have been addressed. Such issues may make it difficult for the writer to begin; paralyze them after a single, early success; pose challenges to maintaining a consistent writing practice; or lead them to lose confidence in the middle of a draft. Her account of the writing process itself involves the action of two aspects of the artist’s mind, each with its own necessities:

The unconscious must flow freely and richly, bringing at demand all the treasures of memory, all the emotions, incidents, scenes, intimations of character and relationship which it has stored away in its depths; the conscious mind must control, combine, and discriminate between these materials without hampering the unconscious flow (Brande 45–46).

Brande’s book is intended as psychic instruction manual, showing the writer how to get the two sides of their personality out of each other’s way so that they may work together in harness.

Robert Olen Butler accepts the notion of a bifurcated mind, but he is more partisan than Brande: “There is no intellect in the world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot” (Butler 85). In From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction , Butler advocates for a daily writing practice based in what he calls “dreamstorming.” Beginning work on a novel, the writer should enter into a kind of trance during which they “free-float” and “free-associate” (Butler 87). “You’re going to go into your dream space,” he says, “you’re going to float around and you’re going to dream storm potential scenes in such a novel as this with such characters as these with such yearnings as these” (Butler 87).

Craft Classics

T here are any number of modern books on the craft of fiction writing, but the traditionalist will want to seek guidance from the great masters of the past. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces , for example, collects a set of prologues penned by Henry James for a 1909 collection of his fiction, including his well-known account of “the house of fiction” in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady . Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction (1924) provides an account of the development of modern fiction and discloses some essential truths about writing. Wharton observes, for example, that a writer doesn’t have much choice regarding the nature of their talent. Once they discover what they are good at, they must choose subjects that complement their strengths and “learn to renounce the others…as a first step toward doing that particular one well” (Wharton 20).

Another canonical craft book, E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel makes an often quoted distinction between story and plot. A story is “a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence,” as opposed to a plot, in which events in the narrative are arranged with “the emphasis falling on causality” (Forster 86). Most readers will also recognize Forster’s categorization of characters as either “flat” or “round.” Flat characters “in their purest form…are constructed around a single idea or quality” (Forster 67). Such characters have their advantages; they are easy for the reader to remember, and they bring with them “their own atmosphere” (Forster 69). Flat characters can also offer some refreshing comic relief in an otherwise serious book (Forster 73). Round characters are more complex. They change over the course of a story, have multiple dimensions, and “cannot be summed up in a single phrase” (Forster 69). A successful novel, Forster counsels, needs both kinds of characters.

On Writing collects seven essays by Eudora Welty. In one, Welty contrasts the approach to story and character taken by Chekhov, Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence; and in another discusses the development of one of her own stories, “No Place for You, My Love,” and how she arrived at its unusual point of view. Other essays consider the nature of place and time and fiction. In “Must the Novelist Crusade?,” Welty, a white Southern author working against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, reflects on the relationship between political advocacy and the writing of novels.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose contains selected essays and lectures by Flannery O’Connor on topics ranging from peacocks to the relation between Christianity and writing, to the need to preserve the distinctive character of Southern writing. In more than one essay, the author warns against writing stories from abstract ideas or in the service of political agendas. Stories, she writes, must be grounded in the “concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on the earth” (O’Connor 68). Ultimately, a story has to “convince through the senses…it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched” (O’Connor 91).

John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers is something of a modern craft classic. In it, Gardner articulates his aesthetic standard for fiction in any genre: a work must evoke a “vivid and continuous dream” in the mind of the reader:

Vivid because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to conclusion (Gardner, 30).

According to this rubric, anything that makes the reader’s dream less vivid (e.g., generalization in place of a particular detail) or less continuous (e.g., the poorly chosen word that draws too much attention to itself) is a sign of bad writing.

The Art of Fiction has much to say not just about aesthetics, but also technique. In a famous exercise from the book, Gardner askes the reader-writer to “describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention who does the seeing” ( The Art of Fiction 37). The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate that description should never strive for objectivity, to pile up actualities as if the viewer were a machine. Rather, description ought to be infused with point-of-view and emotion, “the barn … must be tricked into mumbling its secrets” (Gardner, The Art of Fiction 36–37).

Gardner also provides a definition and discussion of the term “psychic distance,” an aspect of point of view: “By psychic distance we mean the distance the reader feels between himself and the events of the story” (Gardner The Art of Fiction 111). This distance can range from detached and journalistic to stream of consciousness. Ron Hanson’s story “Wickedness” begins: “At the end of the nineteenth century, a girl from Delaware got on a milk train in Omaha and took a seat in the second-class car” (253). Hanson has chosen to place the reader at a vast remove from the experience of “the girl from Delaware.” If the story imposed less psychic distance, it would open quite differently, perhaps something like: “Damn it all, she’d nearly missed the milk truck. And now, the sour stink of the second-class car.”

Another well-established craft text is Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction . Each of Baxter’s essays considers a question not just of craft, but also of society. He observes, for example, the tendency of modern readers to morally condemn imperfect characters:

When people can’t make any narrative sense of their own feelings, readers start to ask writers to tell them what they are supposed to feel. They want moralizing polemics…[which are] more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex and unwitting mistakes (Baxter, Burning 15).

Baxter goes on to argue that “in fiction, characters are under no obligation to be good; they only have to be interesting” ( Burning 23). Another essay offers a technique for deepening characters: “with counterpointed characterization, certain kinds of people are pushed together, people who bring out a crucial response in each other” (Baxter Burning 88). A third provides an account of the origins, appeal, and persistence of melodrama in storytelling.

Writers who struggle with symbolism in their work may find help in Baxter’s concept of “rhyming action.” Rather than deploying overt symbols, Baxter suggests a more intuitive and understated approach, presenting an image or event to the reader at an early point in the story, without much fanfare, with the intention that it be all but forgotten. The writer then brings the image back later, allowing the reader to reconsider it in the context of what has happened in the story.

A scene in Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” provides the title for George Saunders’s recent book on craft, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life . The book includes seven stories by the great Russian writers Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol. In his insightful and companionable discussion of these works, Saunders articulates his own aesthetic theories and offers practical advice. Writers, he says, should read their drafts as if they were “bouncers, roaming through Club Story, asking each part,‘Excuse me, but why do I need you to be in here?’ In a perfect story, every part has a good answer” (Saunders 91). Saunders also further develops his “gas station” model, originally sketched out in his essay “A Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s story ‘The School.’” Saunders imagines the reader as a toy race car moving around a track, passing through a series of “gas stations” that provide bursts of energy, hopefully enough to carry the car to the next station and, eventually, to the story’s conclusion.

In How Fiction Works , James Wood examines fiction fundamentals with chapters dedicated to narration, detail, character, language, and dialogue. Wood is best known as a literary critic, and although he poses “theoretical questions” in the book, he responds to them as a practitioner “or, to say it differently, asks a critic’s questions and offers a writer’s answers” (xviii). Wood’s discussion of point of view is especially acute, and he is quick to question received wisdom on the subject: “Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliable…we know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator’s unreliability,” and “on the other side, omniscient narration is rarely as omniscient as it seems … authorial style generally has a way of making third-person omniscience seem partial and inflected” (5, 6). Wood also has a great deal to teach the literary writer about “free indirect style,” or what is more commonly referred to in writing classes and workshops as “third-person limited” point of view or simply “close third.” He argues that “thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once” (Wood 11).

In contrast to Wood, who draws on narrative theory and the history of literary realism for insights into how fiction functions, Lisa Cron looks to recent developments in neuroscience to explain how narrative texts work on the minds of their readers. As Cron outlines in her introduction, Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence , contains “twelve chapters, each zeroing in on an aspect of how the brain works, its corresponding revelation about story, and the nuts and bolts of how to actualize it in your work” (5). Unlike more essayistic books on craft, Cron’s chapters are clearly structured, with heads and sub-heads, and each closes with a set of questions for the writer to consider in relation to their draft.

Literary fiction has long defined itself in opposition to so-called “genre fiction”: horror, mystery and crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance. Gardner, for example, consistently refers to these genres as “trash” or “junk fiction,” though he concedes that they can be “elevated” by the “serious literary artist” ( Art of Fiction x, 21). Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction refuses this distinction and considers what writers of literary realism have to learn from just the kinds of books and stories that Gardner and others wish to exclude from the halls of high culture. Realism, Percy observes, is the late-comer to the literary landscape, not the genres it denigrates and excludes: “Look back on the long, hoof-marked trail of literature. The beastly majority of stories contain elements of the fantastic” (14). They also, not surprisingly, contain the urgency of plots and narrative arcs.

Other notable books on general craft include John Dufresne’s The Lie that Tells a Truth: Essays on Fiction , Rust Hills’s Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular: An Informal Textbook , Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: A 21 st -Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story , and Margot Livesey’s The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing .

Characterization, Structure, and Style

S ome craft books are more narrowly focused , treating a single element of storytelling technique such as characterization, structure, or style. One such text is David Corbett’s The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV . To get to know their characters, it is not enough for the writer to make lists of physical characteristics, hobbies, personality traits, and biographical facts. To understand their characters, the writer is advised to draft scenes “in which characters engage meaningfully and in conflict with each other” and to do so “at all stages of character development: conception, development, and portrayal” (Corbett xxvi). “Character biographies created from scenes,” Corbett argues, “are intrinsically more useful than those consisting of mere information” (xxvi).

Each chapter in The Art of Character offers insights and exercises the writer can use to deepen characters by delving into their desires, frustrations, vulnerabilities, secrets, and contradictions. Many readers will marvel at the erudition of writers like Prose and Wood, who seem to be able to call up deep cuts from the literary canon at will to illustrate their points. Others, however, will appreciate that Corbett draws his examples not only from literary classics, but also well-known films like The Godfather and binge-worthy drama series such as Breaking Bad .

Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form focuses on story structure, proposing two broad categories, “linear design” and “modular design.” Simply put, stories following a linear design “start at the beginning, traverse some sort of middle, and stop at the end” (Bell 27). They also “bear some relationship to what is known as the [Freytag] triangle,” which is to say they begin with exposition, are driven by a conflict that rises to a climax, and conclude with a falling action and resolution (Bell 27). Modular narratives, by contrast, establish a structure by arranging elements of the story into a set of meaningful relationships that may have nothing to do with the chains of causality that drive a linear story. Bell provides twelve stories, six of each type, following each one with a discuss of its structure (and other formal elements). He also offers a nearly line-by-line analysis of each piece by means of endnotes inserted into the stories’ text.

Those wishing to delve deeper into nonlinear (what Bell terms “modal”) approaches to narrative will find a fellow traveler in Jane Alison. In her book Meander, Spiral, Explode , Alison invites the writer to take flight from traditional forms grounded in Aristotle’s theories of tragedy and narrative poetry, from Freytag and his triangle. She investigates alternative forms available to the writer of fiction such as spiral, radial, cellular, and fractal patterns:

A radial narrative could spring from a central hole—an incident, pain, absence, horror—around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time. A fractal narrative could branch from a core or a seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core, possibly branching on indefinitely. And cellular narratives come in like parts, not moving forward in time from one to another but creating a network of meaning (Alison 25).

Alison presents examples of these and other forms in works by the likes of Jamaica Kincaid, Marguerite Duras, Stuart Dybek, and Sandra Cisneros. In addition, her discussion of the flow of time in stories, based on the work of narratologists Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman, provides a practical vocabulary for talking about narrative speed—the celerity of a summary, which sprints through expanses of story time in few words, as opposed to a “dilation,” which devotes a great deal of text to a relatively small period of story time (Alison 46).

Over the years, many writers interested in narrative structure have turned to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces , a comparative study of patterns, archetypes, and symbols in stories from religion and mythology. He proposes an outline of “the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero” during which:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder…fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won…the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (Campbell 23).

Campbell further elaborates the structure of this “monomyth,” adding a number of substages to the hero’s journey: “the call to adventure,” “refusal of the call,” “supernatural aid,” and so on (28–30). Campbell’s account of the hero’s journey has influenced a number of popular culture narratives (most famously, Star Wars ) and serves as an enduring template for writers of screenplays, comic books, and fantasy and young adult novels.

Our ideas about culture and narrative, however, have changed markedly since Campbell first published his study in 1949, and contemporary readers are likely to question the epistemological soundness of his assumption that differences between stories from diverse cultures are merely epiphenomenal, that the core stories of all world cultures are actually variants of a single shared myth expressing universal human truths. Still others may detect an unwelcome whiff of colonialism in Campbell’s assertion that the stories of non-Western cultures must all conform to a single structure finally discovered and elucidated by an American critic. Further, as Matthew Salesses points out, Campbell’s “investment in masculinity is not universal” and his “focus on ‘the hero’s journey’ dismisses stories like the heroine’s journey or other stories in which people do not set off to conquer and return with booty…” (18–19).

Literary critic Stanley Fish examines prose style in How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One . There is no getting away from style, Fish observers, no neutral form of writing with which to transparently communicate our ideas. For starters, language doesn’t simply represent feelings and ideas; rather, it helps to form and fashion them. “We can only choose our style,” Fish argues, “not choose to abandon style, and it behooves us to know what the various styles in our repertoire are and what they can do” (42). A sentence, for Fish, is both “an organization of items in the world” and “a structure of logical relationships” (16). Cultivating sentence-level style involves making choices about that organization and the nature of those relationships.

Perhaps the most important decision a stylist can make is choosing between two general styles of sentence, the subordinating and the additive. The subordinating relies upon:

relationships of causality (one event or state is caused by another), temporality (events and states are prior or subsequent to one another), and precedence (events and states are arranged in hierarchies of importance) (Fish 50).

The additive style, however, is not structured by “an overarching logic, but by association,” giving a sense of “spontaneity, haphazardness, and chance” (Fish 62, 61).

This may all seem terribly abstract, but using examples from literary texts, Fish shows how, at the level of sentence style alone, one can distinguish the different formal logics at work in, for example, “The Real Thing” by Henry James (favoring the subordinating style, using commas and parentheses to signal the relative importance of each phrase) and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (favoring the additive style, using “and” to bind a series of images into a verbal-visual chain). Although they are not separated from the flow of the text, How to Write a Sentence also suggests exercises to help the writer become proficient in these and other styles.

Another source for studies of single aspects of fiction craft is Graywolf’s Art of series, edited by Charles Baxter. In each of the slender books in the series, a different writer examines some facet of the craft of writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Baxter’s own contribution, for example, considers the art of subtext, “those elements that propel readers beyond the plot of a novel or short story into the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, the unspoken” ( The Art of Subtext 3). Others of interest to the fiction writer include The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story by Christopher Castellani , The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes by Joan Silber, and Stacy D’erasmo’s The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between in which she argues for a conception of intimacy as “a disturbance, a force that wakes you up, decenters you, radically changes your perception of the world around you and your place in it” (33).

Of course books aren’t the only sources for craft advice and writing prompts. The Paris Review , one of the world’s preeminent literary journals, has published interviews with authors about their work and writing process since its founding in 1953. The first in their numbered “Art of Fiction” series was with novelist E. M. Forster; over the years, subsequent subjects have included Gabriel García Márquez, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and many more. Past interviews can be accessed through the journal, and some have been assembled into a multi-volume collection ( Paris Review Interviews ). Outlets such as Brevity , Catapult , and Lithub publish craft essays online, and Poets & Writers posts weekly writing prompts in the “The Time is Now” section of their site.

On his long-running podcast Bookworm , kcrw ’s Michael Silverblatt interviews authors and poets, asking questions informed by his careful reading of nearly everything his guest has ever written. Each month, The New Yorker Fiction Podcast features a story from the magazine’s archives read by a writer whose work has also been appeared in the New Yorker . After the reading, fiction editor Deborah Treisman and her guest discuss the story.

The International Writing Program (a sister program of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) offers a number of freely accessible, massive open online courses ( mooc s) dedicated to aspects of fiction writing. Each of the iwp ’s mooc -Packs contains a series of online videos making up the self-directed course, together with a guide that explains how to use the materials to teach a class or lead a study group. Courses include How Writers Write Fiction (I & II) , Stories of Place: Writing and the Natural World , and Moving the Margins: Fiction and Inclusion (“Welcome”) .

B rian Shawver’s The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook , and Renni Browne and Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print represent a sub-class of craft books dedicated to the mechanics of writing. The writer of fiction will benefit as much as the journalist or the scholar from The Copyeditor’s Handbook or the “Style and Usage” section of The Chicago Manual of Style , but there are conventions particular to stories and novels that are beyond the scope of such texts. With chapters like “How Should You Format and Punctuate Dialogue,” and “What Are Your Options for Portraying Characters’ Thoughts,” The Language of Fiction provides the novice writer with the tools they need to make informed stylistic decisions. It also contains a helpful glossary for the intuitive writer who remains a little foggy about things such as the distinction between a gerund and a present participle.

Drawing on years of editorial experience, Browne and King adopt a direct and self-assured tone, seeking to steer the beginning writer away from styles and tics likely to evoke an eye-roll from an editor deciding whether or not to publish their story. In their chapter on dialogue, for example, they argue for using “said” almost exclusively for speaker attributions (and eliminating any “-ly” adverb that modifies “said”). Browne and King also provide examples and exercises aimed at eliminating some of the writer’s bad habits and encouraging better ones.

The Non-Neutrality of Craft

I n Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping , Matthew Salesses rejects the notion that writing craft is or could ever be culturally or politically neutral. Salesses argues that craft is in no way universal, but represents, instead, a set of culturally specific expectations: “culture stands behind what makes many craft moves ‘work’ or not, and for whom they work” (15). Salesses would no doubt argue that many of the craft books considered here represent “the dominance of one tradition of craft, serving one particular audience (white, middle-class, straight, able, etc.),” a tradition that does not necessarily serve, and often limits or silences “emerging and marginalized voices” (5–6).

Thus, many writers find it necessary to “break the rules” found in craft books in order to render their experiences in fiction and to tell stories that speak to their own communities. Salesses calls attention to the need for writers to consider who their audience actually is, since this determines “what expectations the writer engages with,” what they can assume their readers “believe in and care about, what they need explained and/or named, where they should focus their attention, what meaning to draw from the text” (42).

In addition to its many insights about the non-neutrality of craft, Salesses’s book also offers a set of new definitions for frequently used craft terms. In Part II, he critiques the workshop model used in most creative writing classes, offers a number of alternatives, and even provides a sample syllabus. The book concludes with thirty-four exercises for revision.

David Mura, author of A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing , likewise rejects the supposed political and social neutrality of craft. White writers, he argues, operate from “certain basic assumptions about race and literature” (Mura 39). They assume, for example, that the reader will default to imagining an unmarked character as white, and so don’t feel a need to “label their white characters by race” (Mura 39). This aligns with many other assumptions, including a disregard for “how a reader of color might view the white characters” and, more broadly, a dismissal of the importance of race to the content and form of a given story (Mura 39).

“For many writers of color,” however, “the lens of race is essential to understand their characters as well as the way the writer views her characters and the larger society” (Mura 40). Writers of color must also make artistic choices “concerning the ways a white reader, a reader of the writer’s own group, and other readers of color will read the text” (Mura 40). Because people of color must constantly “take into the account the power that whiteness and white people exert over their existence,” to ask writers of color “to write outside politics is, in many instances, to ask them to write in a way that denies who they are, that denies their people and those who came before them” (Mura 43, 44).

Mura develops his arguments through close readings of texts by Jonathan Franzen, ZZ Packer, Sherman Alexie, Junot Díaz, and others. In one chapter, Mura offers frank advice for “the student of color in the typical mfa program” (52). Race will probably not be “considered an essential area of study,” he cautions, “since the majority of the white faculty do not believe that such a study is essential to their own writing or to their own pedagogical practices” (Mura 59). In other chapters, he asks white teachers of writing to show greater humility, recognizing that they may not possess “all the tools that a writer of color requires to improve her craft,” and that writers of color may themselves possess tools that are “outside the common knowledge of white writers or even in opposition to some of the tools offered in a white-dominated workshop…” (Mura 77).

Part II of A Stranger’s Journey consists of craft advice for fiction writers, with an emphasis on the need for the protagonist to not only want something, but also to face an irreconcilable choice: “The protagonist is forced to decide whether she should take an action which will lead her closer to one thing she wants, but which will take her farther away or even eliminate her chances of achieving something else she wants…” (Mura 97). Part III is concerned with memoir, rather than fiction, and the book concludes with a set of writing assignments.

In The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom , Felicia Rose Chavez critiques not only the way creative writing is typically taught in college classrooms, but also many of the assumptions behind standard craft advice. She rejects the premise of Francine Prose’s book, for example, that a beginning writer learn about craft through a study of canonical literature. Chavez argues that such an approach serves to “affirm the authority of white literary ‘masters’…imparting an implicit rubric for the ‘right’ way to write” (Chavez 9). She also questions the value of standard craft terms, an “academic vocabulary” deployed in workshop settings as “a badge of authority” (Chavez 10). Chavez validates the alienation writers of color often experience in the traditional workshop, which she describes as “an institution of dominance and control upheld by supposedly venerable workshop leaders (primarily white), majority white workshop participants, and canonical white authors memorialized in hefty anthologies” (5).

Her solution is to radically restructure the form and content of the workshop according to what she terms the “anti-racist model.” In the traditional model, the writer remains silent while classmates critique their story. In the anti-racist model, the author is allowed to “moderate their own workshop while participants rally in service of the author’s vision” (Chavez 10). Craft terms are developed and agreed upon by the participants, canonical texts are replaced with “a living archive of scanned print material and multimedia art” from diverse artists, and these texts are, whenever possible, paired with “a conversation with the author, contextualizing their stories withing a specific lived experience …” (Chavez 9). In addition to providing a trenchant critique of the traditional workshop model and a fully developed alternative, The Antiracist Workshop also offers an appendix with sample lesson plans and an associated website, www.antiracistworkshop.com , that includes “an ever-evolving, multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color and progressive online publishing platforms” (Chavez 181; “Resources”).

W riters and teachers of fiction writing find themselves in a time when much of the received wisdom about craft is being reconsidered. They are called to critically examine such concepts as “literary fiction,” once defined by its supposed opposition to “genre fiction” (Gardner’s “junk” fiction) as well as any notion of a deracialized “pure” craft. Literary lineages are being re-drawn, with more black and indigenous writers, more writers of color, more lgbtq+ writers, and writers with disabilities. The so-called “Iowa model,” which more or less set the template for writing pedagogy, may finally be giving way to a more student-centered approach. By investing in collection development in fiction craft, academic libraries can ensure that writers, teachers, and students will be equipped to engage with these issues, to draw advice from a variety of perspectives, and, hopefully, to thrive as artists and educators.

Reference List

Alison, Jane. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative . Catapult, 2019.

The Art of Fiction . The Paris Review.

Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead. Virago, 2003.

Baxter, Charles, ed. The Art of Series . 13 vols. Graywolf Press.

—. Baxter, Charles. Burning down the House: Essays on Fiction . Graywolf Press, 2008.

Bell, Madison Smartt. Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form. W. W. Norton, 2000.

Bernays, Anne, and Pamela Painter. What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. 2nd ed. Pearson Longman, 2004.

Bookworm . Santa Monica, kcrw . https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm .

Browne, Renni, and Dave King. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print. 2nd ed. William Morrow Paperback, 2004.

Burroway, Janet, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Ned Stuckey-French. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft . 10th ed. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction . ed. by Janet Burroway. Grove, 2006.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces . 3rd ed. New World Library, 2008.

Castellani, Christopher. The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story . Graywolf Press, 2016.

Chavez, Felicia Rose. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: Decolonizing the Creative Classroom . Haymarket Books, 2021.

The Chicago Manual of Style . Seventeenth edition. The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Corbett, David. The Art of Character: Creating Memorable Characters for Fiction, Film, and TV . Penguin Books, 2013.

“Craft and Advice.” Literary Hub . https://lithub.com/category/craftandcriticism/craft-and-advice/ .

“Craft Essays.” Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction . https://brevitymag.com/category/craft-essays/ .

Creating Fiction: Instructions and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs . ed. by Julie Checkoway. Story Press, 2004.

D’Erasmo, Stacey. The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between . Graywolf Press, 2013.

Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life . 2nd Anchor Books Edition. Anchor Books, 2019.

“Don’t Write Alone.” Catapult . https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/topics/notes-on-craft/stories .

Dufresne, John. The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction . W.W. Norton, 2004.

Einsohn, Amy, and Marilyn Schwartz. The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications . Fourth edition, Revised, Updated, and Expanded. University of California Press, 2019.

Fish, Stanley Eugene. How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One . Harper, 2011.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel . Harcourt Brace, 1985.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers . Reissue ed. Vintage, 1991.

—. On Becoming a Novelist . W.W. Norton, 1999.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within . 30th anniversary ed. Shambala, 2016.

Hanson, Ron. “Wickedness.” The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction : 50 North

American Short Stories Since 1970 . ed. by Lex Williford and Michael Martone. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway on Writing . ed. by Larry W. Phillips. Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Hills, L. Rust. Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular: An Informal Textbook . Rev. ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

James, Henry. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces . The University of Chicago Press, 2011

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft . Scribner, 2010.

Kiteley, Brian. The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction . Writer’s Digest Books, 2005.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life . Second Anchor Books Edition, Anchor Books, 2019.

LaPlante, Alice. The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing . W.W. Norton, 2010.

Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story . Mariner Books, 2015.

Livesey, Margot. The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing . Tin House Books, 2017.

Mura, David. A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing . The University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer . ed. by Bret Anthony Johnston. Random House, 2007.

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast , podcast audio. https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction .

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose . ed. by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. Third printing. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.

The Paris Review Interviews . Picador, 2009.

Percy, Benjamin. Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction . Graywolf Press, 2016.

“Resources.” Felicia Rose Chavez. https://www.antiracistworkshop.com/resources .

Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors . Main Street Books, 1999.

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping . Catapult, 2021.

Saunders, George. “A Perfect Gerbil: Reading Barthelme’s story ‘The School.’” The Braindead Megaphone: Essays . Riverhead Books, 2007. 175–186.

—. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life . Random House, 2021.

Shawver, Brian. The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook. University Press of New England, 2013.

Silber, Joan. The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes . Graywolf Press, 2009

“The Time Is Now.” Poets & Writers. https://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises .

VanderMeer, Jeff. Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction . designed by Jeremy Zerfoss. Revised ed. Abrams Image, 2018.

“Welcome to Our mooc -Pack Library.” International Writing Program. http://www.distancelearningiwp.org/home .

Welty, Eudora. On Writing. Modern Library , 2002.

Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction . Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works . Picador, 2008.

Online Programs

Crafting the essay: individually-paced format.

• Grades 7-10
• Individually Paced
• Language Arts

Bring your experiences to life on the page in this personal essay course. Through 10 assignments, we’ll experiment with different essay formats to describe scenes, illustrate conflicts, narrate events, share memories, and extract meaning for yourself and your readers. As you progress through the course, you will use your senses to create vivid descriptions, observe and choose details that convey your perspective to readers, imagine experiences and describe events from other points of view, and deconstruct essays and use them to create new works of writing. You will work on each assignment for at least one week, engaging in all steps of the writing process: ideation, pre-writing, drafting, applying feedback, revising, editing, proofreading, and reflection. Individually paced writing courses are best suited for self-motivated writers with excellent time management skills who will maintain regular email correspondence with their instructors.

Recommended length of enrollment:  6 months

Time Commitment:  4-6 hours of independent work per week.  

Course Overview

What we'll do

We’ll complete 10 essay projects over 10 course units. Each unit includes two lessons, a pre-writing exercise, an essay assignment, and a reflection letter. Your instructor will provide detailed feedback on each exercise and assignment, and you will apply that feedback to your work on the next unit. This course does not have live classes, but students can schedule an individual meeting with the instructor as needed.

What we’ll learn

• To analyze a model text and apply the observations to your own writing
• To engage in the writing process, including pre-writing, drafting, shaping, editing, and submitting for feedback, and then using feedback to revise
• Strategies to assess your own writing, identify needs, and plan revisions
• To identify a main idea within a draft and develop it through revision
• To select factual, informational, and sensory details to shape a narrative or description
• To pay careful attention to word choices and phrasing
• To narrate, reflect on, and extract meaning from your personal experiences
• To describe feelings and behaviors from another person’s point of view
• To develop observational skills and use meaning to select appropriate sensory, factual, and informational details to describe the scene in writing

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Employ pre-writing strategies to externalize ideas and evaluate which are the strongest
• Proofread, analyze, restructure, and revise drafts for submission
• Select events and details that develop and advance an essay’s thesis
• Employ figurative language and literary devices to enhance your narratives
• Incorporate feedback on your writing and make appropriate changes
• Reflect on personal experiences and extract meaning from them in essays
• Write in a range of tones, for a variety of audiences
• Demonstrate empathy and different points of view
• Reflect on your writing process and growth in letters to your instructor
• Ask your instructor for help and have confidence discussing your writing with an adult

How we'll measure learning

Instructors evaluate student work using marking guides and rubrics and provide detailed constructive feedback on each pre-writing task and essay. This course is aligned to ELA Common Core standards for grades 11-12.

Students enroll in a course by selecting an open class below. Students progress at their own pace following course guidelines, with guidance from instructors who strive to meet individual needs. While the course provides students with independence and flexibility, students must manage their time to complete the course before the end date. Note: You need an active CTY Account to complete registration through MyCTY.

Testing and Prerequisites

Students must achieve qualifying scores on an advanced assessment to be eligible for CTY programs. If you don’t have qualifying scores, you have several different testing options. We’ll help you find the right option for your situation.

Cost and Financial Aid

Application fee.

• Nonrefundable Application Fee - $15 (Waived for financial aid applicants)
• Nonrefundable International Fee - $20 (outside US only)

Financial Aid

CTY Financial Aid Availability for Online Programs:

Academic Year 2023-24 (Course start dates July 1, 2023- June 30, 2024): We have concluded our financial aid application review process for Academic Year 2023-2024 Online Programs.

Academic Year 2024-25 (Course start dates July 1, 2024- June 30, 2025): Financial Aid funding is currently available for all eligible students while funding lasts. If interested in applying for financial aid, please select a course with start date of July 1, 2024 or later.

Earning School Credit

Recommended school credit: One half of an academic year

Technical Requirements

This course requires a computer with high-speed Internet access and an up-to-date web browser such as Chrome or Firefox. You must be able to communicate with the instructor via email. Visit the Technical Requirements and Support page for more details.

This course uses a virtual classroom for instructor-student communication. The classroom works on standard computers with the Zoom desktop client , and on tablets or handhelds that support the Zoom Mobile app . Recorded meetings can only be viewed on a computer with the Zoom desktop client installed. The Zoom desktop client and Zoom Mobile App are both free to download.

Terms & Conditions

After a you complete a course, your projects may be used to illustrate work for future students. 

About Language Arts at CTY

Enhance your skills in creative writing and critical reading, learn to craft effective sentences, and develop an analytical approach to reading and writing through our Language Arts courses. Guided by our expert instructors, you can further develop your communication skills in our interdisciplinary visual fluency courses, and explore topics in communication theory, design theory, and cognitive psychology. Through coursework and online discussions with classmates from around the world, you’ll elevate your writing structure and style, hone your craft, and become an adept wordsmith fluent in the language of literary arts. 

Write, Edit, Publish

Walk in the shoes of a writer, editor, and publisher this fall in Master Class I: Writing, Editing, and Publishing , and then collaborate with peers to create the next issue of our CTY Online student-developed literary journal, Lexophilia , in Master Class II: Writing, Editing, and Publishing , offered in the winter.

Explore Greek Myths

Newly revised for fall 2021, you'll read, discuss, and write about Greek myths in Young Readers’ Series: Greek Myths Revisited , studying exciting, heroic characters and ancient narratives that continue to teach us all valuable lessons about life, love, and family.

Meet our Language Arts Instructors

I realize that I love teaching on an almost daily basis. It comes to me in the form of a student's 'ah-ha' moment, when everything clicks and the student understands a challenging concept. I get goose bumps just thinking about it!

Yvonne Borresen

Language Arts Instructor

Creative Writing MFA

• About the Craft Paper

A Typical Schedule

Required texts & sources, the prospectus, the annotated bibliography, citation and style.

• Twin Cities Literary Resources
• The Creative Thesis

Learn how to use MLA style

Learn about citation

Get help with writing

What Is the Craft Paper?

Normally undertaken during a student's third semester of long-distance learning, the Augsburg MFA Program's Craft Paper course is paired with the “Mentorship and Critical and Creative Reading” class.

The Craft Paper course asks students to conduct a semester-long investigation on an element of writing, then produce a paper based on their findings. This paper, totaling approximately 20 pages, should cite numerous sources. It can later be used as the basis for the 20- to 25-minute Craft Talk that MFA students deliver during their final residency.

This 1864 image is in the public domain, according to Wikimedia Commons

Your Craft Paper class will likely meet seven times in the course of a semester. Here is how the class is typically structured:

Session 1. Formulate Your Ideas

Provide roughly five topics for a possible paper, using the Moodle forum. If you have already settled on a topic, describe it in some detail, outlining what concepts and texts (at least five) that you plan to cover. This should run to about a page, single-spaced.

Session 2. Write a Prospectus

See below for the structure and purpose of a prospectus.

Session 3. Make a Beginning

Submit the first five pages of your craft paper to your mentor, using the private studio space set up for you on Moodle.

Session 4. Respond to Feedback

Submit the first fifteen pages of your craft paper to your mentor, then respond to and/or incorporate their feedback.

Session 5. Submit Your Completed Paper

Submit your completed craft paper to your mentor.

Session 6. Share Your Craft Paper

After responding to and incorporating feedback from Session 5, post a revised draft of your craft paper to the appropriate forum on Moodle. Read and comment on the papers posted by your peers.

Session 7. Submit Your Final Draft

Submit the final draft of your craft paper to your mentor.

The required texts will vary from student to student, depending on their interests and the subject of their craft paper. Here are some selected representative texts drawn from one 2014 paper:

• Aronson, Linda. The 21st Century Screenplay: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Tomorrow’s Films . Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2010. Print.
• Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Styles & Modes of Production to 1960 . New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Print.
• Cameron, James. Titanic . Dir. James Cameron. Prod. James Cameron and Jon Landau. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. 20th Century Fox, 1997. Film.
• Caputo, John D. "In Praise of Ambiguity." Ambiguity in the Western Mind . 15-34. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
• Currie, Gregory. "Unreliability Refigured: Narrative In Literature and Film." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53.1 (1995): 19-29. JSTOR. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.
• Dowd, James J., and Nicole R. Pallotta. “The End of Romance: The Demystification of Love in the Postmodern Age.” Sociological Perspectives 43.4 (Winter 2000): 549-580. JSTOR. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.
• Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting . New York: Delta, 2005. Print.
• Halpern, Faye. "Unmasking Criticism: The Problem with Being a Good Reader of Sentimental Rhetoric." Narrative 19.1 (2011): 51-71. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.
• Meyer, Michael J. “Reflections on Comic Reconciliations: Ethics, Memory, and Anxious Happy Endings.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66.1 (Winter 2008): 77-87. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2014.
• Shone, Tom. Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer . New York: Free Press, 2004. Print.
• Williams, Linda. "Mega-Melodrama! Vertical and Horizontal Suspensions of the ‘Classical.’" Modern Drama 55.4 (2012): 523-543. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Mar. 2014.

This section, adapted from a guide on the University of Florida Website , is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Writing a Prospectus

There are many different kinds of prospectuses for different purposes. In the humanities, Ph.D. students are asked to submit dissertation prospectuses to their committees; most research grant applications require them; academic job candidates often include short prospectuses with their application materials; and book publishers request them as part of the process of considering a manuscript for publication. Editors of journals and essay volumes may also request a prospectus of a proposed article. These different kinds of prospectuses differ mostly in regard to the length and detail with which the project is described. Dissertation prospectuses can run anywhere from 5 to 30 pages, depending on the amount of detail requested of the student, while grant and job applications generally require brevity (1–2 single-spaced pages for a job application; 3–5 single-spaced pages for many grants). It is highly likely that before a major humanities project is published, 3 or 4 different kinds of prospectuses will have been written for it.

A prospectus should answer the following questions:

• What is the subject of the study? How is the subject defined (is there any special use of terminology or context)? What are the main research questions the study aims to answer?
• Why is the author addressing this topic? What have other scholars written about this subject, and how is this author's approach, information, or perspective different? What need or gap does this proposed study fill in the scholarly conversation? What new approach to a familiar topic does it propose to offer? What will be the study's original and special contributions to this subject?
• What are the main sources that will be used to explore this subject? Why are these sources appropriate?
• What is the proposed organization of the study?
• Does the author have any special needs in order to complete this study? In particular, does s/he need funding to travel to archives, gain access to collections, or acquire technical equipment? Does s/he have the special skills (languages, technical expertise) that this project might require?

Organization

• Title: It should be informative and helpful in pinpointing the topic and emphasis of your study.
• The body of the prospectus: This section should concentrate on addressing questions 1-3 above. The goal of this section is both to describe the project and to "sell" the reader on its potential interest and scholarly significance.
• A chapter breakdown: This can either be a formal section, in which each chapter is described in turn in about a paragraphâs worth of text, or it can be done more narratively, in which the whole project is outlined as a more seamless story. Either way, it should address question #4, above.
• For grant applications, if applicable: Provide a brief paragraph at the end addressing question #5.
• For dissertation prospectuses: A bibliography is usually required.
• For book prospectuses: A table of contents is usually requested.

Some Further Considerations

Think about your audience. Your prospectus should be meaningful and interesting to an intelligent general reader.

In most cases, prospectuses are being reviewed because people are considering entrusting you with something: the freedom of advancing to candidacy; a job; grant money; a book contract. They need to know if their trust will be well placed, and that you are a good bet to follow through on your proposed work. Questions that often arise in this regard are as follows:

• How interesting and important is this study? (Will we have helped make an important contribution if we support this work?)
• Is the study feasible? Can it be done in a reasonable time frame?
• Can this author produce an excellent dissertation or book? (Nobody wants to back a shoddy effort)

Your prospectus should address the first of these concerns head-on and show the reader exactly why your project is important, interesting, and, if possible, relevant to broad (human/social/political/cultural) concerns.

The second two questions are a little tougher to address. Often, they emerge because the project appears to be too broad or ambitious in scope or not yet completely formulated. Or perhaps the readers have concerns about the author's scholarship. If you are concerned that your prospectus describes a project that appears too big to be successfully completed, this might be a signal that you need to reconsider your project's structure. As for the scholarship issue, you can best address this by making sure to show that you are completely in charge of the scholarly apparatus of your project: you know what you're talking about in regard to the scholarly debates, and you give sufficient (and the right) citations. (A negative example: if you say you're the first person to study a particular topic, you had better be right!)

For each source you consult, you will write a brief paragraph — also known as an “annotation” — that summarizes the source, evaluates it (what do you find interesting or insightful about it? disagreeable or questionable?), and proposes how it might be useful to you.

For more details on annotated bibliographies in general, see the Purdue OWL — the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University .

Here’s an example. Let’s say I’m writing a craft paper on the divide between literary and genre fiction, and I’ve read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven to use as one of my examples.

St. John Mandel, Emily. Station Eleven . New York: Penguin Random House, 2014. This bestselling novel is dystopian in its content but literary, graceful, and evocative in its style. On the first page of the novel, an actor playing King Lear dies on stage of a heart attack; but the real tragedy is the pandemic that sweeps the globe that night, destroying civilization as we know it. Weaving together the threads of multiple characters from that night, the novel moves forward and backward through time in a way that is powerful without feeling pat. The questions that propel us through the narrative: will these people survive, and how did they get here (who are they? Where do they come from? How do their stories connect?). Art is also very important to the novel, and the mantra of the story is the phrase painted on the caravan of the Traveling Symphony: Because survival is insufficient. In my craft paper, I will argue that the reason the novel has baffled critics who want to categorize it as either “genre” or “literary” fiction is because it is both: on the one hand it asks the same questions of plot that a generic sci-fi novel might ask (for example: how do people survive when civilization is destroyed?), but also the same questions of philosophy and humanity that a literary novel would illuminate (what constitutes a good life? A good death? What does civilization even mean?). I intend to use the novel as an example of contemporary fiction that combines a compelling, tension-filled plot with the hallmarks of literary prose: a thoughtful structure, well-drawn characters, and language that is vivid, often bordering on poetry.

Examples of recent craft papers can be found on the MFA community Moodle page , which Augsburg MFA students have access to.

Formal papers in the Creative Writing program use MLA style.

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• URL: https://library.augsburg.edu/cw-mfa

Fall 2024 Semester

Undergraduate courses.

Composition courses that offer many sections (ENGL 101, 201, 277 and 379) are not listed on this schedule unless they are tailored to specific thematic content or particularly appropriate for specific programs and majors.

• 100-200 level

ENGL 151.S01: Introduction to English Studies

Tuesday and Thursday, 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Sharon Smith

ENGL 151 serves as an introduction to both the English major and the discipline of English studies. In this class, you will develop the thinking, reading, writing and research practices that define both the major and the discipline. Much of the semester will be devoted to honing your literary analysis skills, and we will study and discuss texts from several different genres—poetry, short fiction, the novel, drama and film—as well as some literary criticism. As we do so, we will explore the language of the discipline, and you will learn a variety of key literary terms and concepts. In addition, you will develop your skills as both a writer and researcher within the discipline of English.

ENGL 201.ST1 Composition II: The Mind/Body Connection

In this section of English 201, students will use research and writing to learn more about problems that are important to them and articulate ways to address those problems. The course will focus specifically on issues related to the mind, the body and the relationship between them. The topics we will discuss during the course will include the correlation between social media and body image; the efficacy of sex education programs; the degree to which beliefs about race and gender influence school dress codes; and the unique mental and physical challenges faced by college students today. In this course, you will be learning about different approaches to argumentation, analyzing the arguments of others and constructing your own arguments. At the same time, you will be honing your skills as a researcher and developing your abilities as a persuasive and effective writer.

ENGL 201.S10 Composition II: Environmental Writing   

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 1-1:50 p.m.

Gwen Horsley

English 201 will help students develop the ability to think critically and analytically and to write effectively for other university courses and careers. This course will provide opportunities to develop analytical skills that will help students become critical readers and effective writers. Specifically, in this class, students will:

• Focus on the relationships between world environments, land, animals and humankind.
• Read various essays by environmental, conservational and regional authors.
• Produce student writings. 

Students will improve their writing skills by reading essays and applying techniques they witness in others’ work and those learned in class. This class is also a course in logical and creative thought. Students will write about humankind’s place in the world and our influence on the land and animals, places that hold special meaning to them or have influenced their lives and stories of their own families and their places and passions in the world. Students will practice writing in an informed and persuasive manner, in language that engages and enlivens readers by using vivid verbs and avoiding unnecessary passives, nominalizations and expletive constructions.

Students will prepare writing assignments based on readings and discussions of essays included in "Literature and the Environment " and other sources. They may use "The St. Martin’s Handbook," as well as other sources, to review grammar, punctuation, mechanics and usage as needed.

ENGL 201.13 Composition II: Writing the Environment

Tuesday and Thursday 9:30-10:45 a.m.

Paul Baggett

For generations, environmentalists have relied on the power of prose to change the minds and habits of their contemporaries. In the wake of fires, floods, storms and droughts, environmental writing has gained a new sense of urgency, with authors joining activists in their efforts to educate the public about the grim realities of climate change. But do they make a difference? Have reports of present and future disasters so saturated our airwaves that we no longer hear them? How do writers make us care about the planet amidst all the noise? In this course, students will examine the various rhetorical strategies employed by some of today’s leading environmental writers and filmmakers. And while analyzing their different arguments, students also will strengthen their own strategies of argumentation as they research and develop essays that explore a range of environmental concerns.

ENGL 201 Composition II: Food Writing

S17 Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-1:45 p.m.

S18 Tuesday and Thursday 2-3:15 p.m.

Jodi Andrews

In this composition class, students will critically analyze essays about food, food systems and environments, food cultures, the intersections of personal choice, market forces and policy and the values underneath these forces. Students will learn to better read like writers, noting authors’ purpose, audience organizational moves, sentence-level punctuation and diction. We will read a variety of essays including research-intensive arguments and personal narratives which intersect with one of our most primal needs as humans: food consumption. Students will rhetorically analyze texts, conduct advanced research, reflect on the writing process and write essays utilizing intentional rhetorical strategies. Through doing this work, students will practice the writing moves valued in every discipline: argument, evidence, concision, engaging prose and the essential research skills for the 21st century.

ENGL 221.S01 British Literature I

Michael S. Nagy

English 221 is a survey of early British literature from its inception in the Old English period with works such as "Beowulf" and the “Battle of Maldon,” through the Middle Ages and the incomparable writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain - poet, to the Renaissance and beyond. Students will explore the historical and cultural contexts in which all assigned reading materials were written, and they will bring that information to bear on class discussion. Likely themes that this class will cover include heroism, humor, honor, religion, heresy and moral relativity. Students will write one research paper in this class and sit for two formal exams: a midterm covering everything up to that point in the semester, and a comprehensive final. Probable texts include the following:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages. Ed. Alfred David, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century and Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. George M. Logan, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K Lewalski, and M. H. Abrams. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. Ed. George M. Logan, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K Lewalski, and M. H. Abrams. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• Gibaldi, Joseph. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003.
• Any Standard College Dictionary.

ENGL 240.S01 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

Monday, Wednesday and Friday noon-12:50 p.m.

April Myrick

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various types of juvenile literature. Text selection will focus on the themes of imagination and breaking boundaries.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

Randi Anderson

In English 240 students will develop the skills to interpret and evaluate various genres of literature for juvenile readers. This particular section will focus on various works of literature at approximately the K-5 grade level. We will read a large range of works that fall into this category, as well as information on the history, development and genre of juvenile literature.

Readings for this course include classical works such as "Hatchet," "Little Women", "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Brown Girl Dreaming," as well as newer works like "Storm in the Barn," "Anne Frank’s Diary: A Graphic Adaptation," "Lumberjanes," and a variety of picture books. These readings will be paired with chapters from "Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction " to help develop understanding of various genres, themes and concepts that are both related to juvenile literature and also present in our readings.

In addition to exposing students to various genres of writing (poetry, historical fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, picture books, graphic novels, etc.) this course will also allow students to engage in a discussion of larger themes present in these works such as censorship, race and gender. Students’ understanding of these works and concepts will be developed through readings, research, discussion posts, exams and writing assignments designed to get students to practice analyzing poetry, picture books, informational books and transitional/easy readers.

ENGL 241.S01: American Literature I

Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-1:45 p.m.

This course provides a broad, historical survey of American literature from the early colonial period to the Civil War. Ranging across historical periods and literary genres—including early accounts of contact and discovery, narratives of captivity and slavery, poetry of revolution, essays on gender equality and stories of industrial exploitation—this class examines how subjects such as colonialism, nationhood, religion, slavery, westward expansion, race, gender and democracy continue to influence how Americans see themselves and their society.

Required Texts

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Package 1, Volumes A and B Beginnings to 1865, Ninth Edition. (ISBN 978-0-393-26454-8)

ENGL 283.S01 Introduction to Creative Writing

Steven Wingate

Students will explore the various forms of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) not one at a time in a survey format—as if there were decisive walls of separation between then—but as intensely related genres that share much of their creative DNA. Through close reading and work on personal texts, students will address the decisions that writers in any genre must face on voice, rhetorical position, relationship to audience, etc. Students will produce and revise portfolios of original creative work developed from prompts and research. This course fulfills the same SGR #2 requirements ENGL 201; note that the course will involve a research project. Successful completion of ENGL 101 (including by test or dual credit) is a prerequisite.

ENGL 283.S02 Introduction to Creative Writing

Jodilyn Andrews

This course introduces students to the craft of writing, with readings and practice in at least two genres (including fiction, poetry and drama).

ENGL 283.ST1 Introduction to Creative Writing

Amber Jensen, M.A., M.F.A.

This course explores creative writing as a way of encountering the world, research as a component of the creative writing process, elements of craft and their rhetorical effect and drafting, workshop and revision as integral parts of writing polished literary creative work. Student writers will engage in the research practices that inform the writing of literature and in the composing strategies and writing process writers use to create literary texts. Through their reading and writing of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, students will learn about craft elements, find examples of those craft elements in published works and apply these elements in their own creative work, developed through weekly writing activities, small group and large group workshop and conferences with the instructor. Work will be submitted, along with a learning reflection and revision plan in each genre and will then be revised and submitted as a final portfolio at the end of the semester to demonstrate continued growth in the creation of polished literary writing.

• 300-400 level

ENGL 424.S01 Language Arts Methods grades 7-12  

Tuesday 6-8:50 p.m.

Danielle Harms

Techniques, materials and resources for teaching English language and literature to middle and secondary school students. Required of students in the English education option.

AIS/ENGL 447.S01: American Indian Literature of the Present 

Thursdays 3-6 p.m.

This course introduces students to contemporary works by authors from various Indigenous nations. Students examine these works to enhance their historical understanding of Indigenous peoples, discover the variety of literary forms used by those who identify as Indigenous writers, and consider the cultural and political significance of these varieties of expression. Topics and questions to be explored include:

• Genre: What makes Indigenous literature indigenous?
• Political and Cultural Sovereignty: Why have an emphasis on tribal specificity and calls for “literary separatism” emerged in recent decades, and what are some of the critical conversations surrounding such particularized perspectives?
• Gender and Sexuality: What are the intersecting concerns of Indigenous Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and how might these research fields inform one another?
• Trans-Indigeneity: What might we learn by comparing works across different Indigenous traditions, and what challenges do such comparisons present?
• Aesthetics: How do Indigenous writers understand the dynamics between tradition and creativity?
• Visual Forms: What questions or concerns do visual representations (television and film) by or about Indigenous peoples present?

Possible Texts

• Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri and Josie Douglas (eds), Skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing. IAD Press, 2000. (978-1864650327)
• Erdrich, Louise, The Sentence. Harper, 2021 (978-0062671127)
• Harjo, Joy, Poet Warrior: A Memoir. Norton, 2021 (978-0393248524)
• Harjo, Sterlin and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs (selected episodes)
• Talty, Morgan. Night of the Living Rez, 2022, Tin House (978-1953534187)
• Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweet Grass, Milkweed Editions (978-1571313560)
• Wilson, Diane. The Seed Keeper: A Novel. Milkweed Editions (978-1571311375)
• Critical essays by Alexie, Allen, Cohen, Cox, King, Kroeber, Ortiz, Piatote, Ross and Sexton, Smith, Taylor, Teuton, Treuer, Vizenor, and Womack.

ENGL 472.S01: Film Criticism

Tuesdays 2-4:50 p.m.

Jason McEntee

Do you have an appreciation for, and enjoy watching, movies? Do you want to study movies in a genre-oriented format (such as those we typically call the Western, the screwball comedy, the science fiction or the crime/gangster, to name a few)? Do you want to explore the different critical approaches for talking and writing about movies (such as auteur, feminist, genre or reception)?

In this class, you will examine movies through viewing and defining different genres while, at the same time, studying and utilizing different styles of film criticism. You will share your discoveries in both class discussions and short writings. The final project will be a formal written piece of film criticism based on our work throughout the semester. The course satisfies requirements and electives for all English majors and minors, including both the Film Studies and Professional Writing minors. (Note: Viewing of movies outside of class required and may require rental and/or streaming service fees.)

ENGL 476.ST1: Fiction

In this workshop-based creative writing course, students will develop original fiction based on strong attention to the fundamentals of literary storytelling: full-bodied characters, robust story lines, palpable environments and unique voices. We will pay particular attention to process awareness, to the integrity of the sentence, and to authors' commitments to their characters and the places in which their stories unfold. Some workshop experience is helpful, as student peer critique will be an important element of the class.

ENGL 479.01 Capstone: The Gothic

Wednesday 3-5:50 p.m.

With the publication of Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto " in 1764, the Gothic officially came into being. Dark tales of physical violence and psychological terror, the Gothic incorporates elements such as distressed heroes and heroines pursued by tyrannical villains; gloomy estates with dark corridors, secret passageways and mysterious chambers; haunting dreams, troubling prophecies and disturbing premonitions; abduction, imprisonment and murder; and a varied assortment of corpses, apparitions and “monsters.” In this course, we will trace the development of Gothic literature—and some film—from the eighteenth-century to the present time. As we do so, we will consider how the Gothic engages philosophical beliefs about the beautiful and sublime; shapes psychological understandings of human beings’ encounters with horror, terror, the fantastic and the uncanny; and intervenes in the social and historical contexts in which it was written. We’ll consider, for example, how the Gothic undermines ideals related to domesticity and marriage through representations of domestic abuse, toxicity and gaslighting. In addition, we’ll discuss Gothic texts that center the injustices of slavery and racism. As many Gothic texts suggest, the true horrors of human existence often have less to do with inexplicable supernatural phenomena than with the realities of the world in which we live. 

ENGL 485.S01: Undergraduate Writing Center Learning Assistants 

Flexible Scheduling

Nathan Serfling

Since their beginnings in the 1920s and 30s, writing centers have come to serve numerous functions: as hubs for writing across the curriculum initiatives, sites to develop and deliver workshops and resource centers for faculty as well as students, among other functions. But the primary function of writing centers has necessarily and rightfully remained the tutoring of student writers. This course will immerse you in that function in two parts. During the first four weeks, you will explore writing center praxis—that is, the dialogic interplay of theory and practice related to writing center work. This part of the course will orient you to writing center history, key theoretical tenets and practical aspects of writing center tutoring. Once we have developed and practiced this foundation, you will begin work in the writing center as a tutor, responsible for assisting a wide variety of student clients with numerous writing tasks. Through this work, you will learn to actively engage with student clients in the revision of a text, respond to different student needs and abilities, work with a variety of writing tasks and rhetorical situations, and develop a richer sense of writing as a complex and negotiated social process.

Graduate Courses

Engl 572.s01: film criticism, engl 576.st1 fiction.

In this workshop-based creative writing course, students will develop original fiction based on strong attention to the fundamentals of literary storytelling: full-bodied characters, robust story lines, palpable environments and unique voices. We will pay particular attention to process awareness, to the integrity of the sentence and to authors' commitments to their characters and the places in which their stories unfold. Some workshop experience is helpful, as student peer critique will be an important element of the class.

ENGL 605.S01 Seminar in Teaching Composition

Thursdays 1-3:50 p.m.

This course will provide you with a foundation in the pedagogies and theories (and their attendant histories) of writing instruction, a foundation that will prepare you to teach your own writing courses at SDSU and elsewhere. As you will discover through our course, though, writing instruction does not come with any prescribed set of “best” practices. Rather, writing pedagogies stem from and continue to evolve because of various and largely unsettled conversations about what constitutes effective writing and effective writing instruction. Part of becoming a practicing writing instructor, then, is studying these conversations to develop a sense of what “good writing” and “effective writing instruction” might mean for you in our particular program and how you might adapt that understanding to different programs and contexts.

As we read about, discuss and research writing instruction, we will address a variety of practical and theoretical topics. The practical focus will allow us to attend to topics relevant to your immediate classroom practices: designing a curriculum and various types of assignments, delivering the course content and assessing student work, among others. Our theoretical topics will begin to reveal the underpinnings of these various practical matters, including their historical, rhetorical, social and political contexts. In other words, we will investigate the praxis—the dialogic interaction of practice and theory—of writing pedagogy. As a result, this course aims to prepare you not only as a writing teacher but also as a nascent writing studies/writing pedagogy scholar.

At the end of this course, you should be able to engage effectively in the classroom practices described above and participate in academic conversations about writing pedagogy, both orally and in writing. Assessment of these outcomes will be based primarily on the various writing assignments you submit and to a smaller degree on your participation in class discussions and activities.

ENGL 726.S01: The New Woman, 1880–1900s 

Thursdays 3–5:50 p.m.

Katherine Malone

This course explores the rise of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century. The label New Woman referred to independent women who rebelled against social conventions. Often depicted riding bicycles, smoking cigarettes and wearing masculine clothing, these early feminists challenged gender roles and sought broader opportunities for women’s employment and self-determination. We will read provocative fiction and nonfiction by New Women writers and their critics, including authors such as Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton, Amy Levy, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Grant Allen and George Gissing. We will analyze these exciting texts through a range of critical lenses and within the historical context of imperialism, scientific and technological innovation, the growth of the periodical press and discourse about race, class and gender. In addition to writing an argumentative seminar paper, students will complete short research assignments and lead discussion.

ENGL 792.ST1 Women in War: Female Authors and Characters in Contemporary War Lit

In this course, we will explore the voices of female authors and characters in contemporary literature of war. Drawing from various literary theories, our readings and discussion will explore the contributions of these voices to the evolving literature of war through archetypal and feminist criticism. We will read a variety of short works (both theoretical and creative) and complete works such as (selections subject to change): "Eyes Right" by Tracy Crow, "Plenty of Time When We Get Home" by Kayla Williams, "You Know When the Men are Gone" by Siobhan Fallon, "Still, Come Home" by Katie Schultz and "The Fine Art of Camouflage" by Lauren Johnson.