Registration limited to 12 participants
Members: $100 Non-members: $125
Begins April 14. Duration: 2 weeks
*This course uses Google Classroom. All users must have a Gmail account to participate in the workshop.*
SYNOPSIS:
Over the course of this fiction workshop, we will build and rebuild the same scene from various perspectives, focusing intensely – one at a time – on different storytelling tools (setting, dialogue, movement, and sensory stimuli). By breaking apart a writer’s scene-building tools in this way, writers will be able to fully concentrate on, and explore, the power of each one. The final assignment will combine the various scene-building tools, and the assignments generated by them, into one final, fully formed scene. The final assignment will also incorporate use of interiority, eg: “telling.”
As we write, we will read four short scenes by various Canadian writers that illustrate the different narrative techniques participants will focus on in each assignment, with the goal of identifying the effectiveness of each narrative choices in building the particular momentum or mood of that scene.
Participants will submit their pieces to the instructor for private feedback; as each assignment comes due, participants will also be invited to share their pieces with their fellow workshop participants for unstructured constructive group feedback and discussion.
It is recommended that participants create a new scene
NOTES FOR PARTICIPANTS:
- This course focuses on exercising specific narrative techniques within the confines of a short fiction scene in any genre.
- The final 1,000 word scene the participant creates may be a complete piece, or part of a larger piece of fiction.
- It is recommended that participants write something new for this course; the purpose of the course is to intentionally exercise the use of specific narrative tools, not to workshop existing writing.
- Participants will identify and use specific techniques of showing and of telling in building a scene.
- Each participant will develop a written scene that uses: setting; conflict; dialogue; action; mood; and sensory detail.
- Participants will demonstrate the techniques of both showing and telling in their scenes.
- Participant will demonstrate their understanding of these prose writing techniques by editing their scenes to create a balance of techniques within a 1,000 (approximate) word count.
- Participants will apply their learning about the effective use of these prose writing techniques in offering constructive feedback to their fellow workshop participants.
About the instructor:
Leslie Greentree is the author of the short story collection A Minor Planet for You, which won the 2007 Howard O’Hagan Prize for Short Fiction, and two poetry books: go-go dancing for Elvis, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and guys named Bill. Leslie has won CBC literary competitions for short fiction and poetry, and the Sarah Selecky 2013 Little Bird short fiction competition for a story that appears in her current short story manuscript, This is not the apocalypse I was hoping for. She co-wrote the play Oral Fixations with her life partner Blaine Newton; it was professionally produced in 2014 by Ignition Theatre.
Registration is now closed.