A Story A Day

This exercise is to get you generating a lot of possibilities for your short stories this semester and to get you familiar with the process of writing every day.  If I could have my way, I would require you to write 250-500 words a day, 7 days a week, for the entire semester.  Think of the writer you’d be after that!  You’d have the beginnings of a collection!  But, since I can’t do that, I will start the semester out by having you write every day for a week.

So, here’s the assignment:  Thursday, 9-8, you must bring in between 5-7 stories (hence, a story a day) that could be the seeds of your stories this semester.  The typical published short story is 15 pages long.  If you can manage to write a 15 page story every day for a week, more power to you.  But for the sake of your sanity, I will require only that you produce 1-2 pages per each story (250-500 words).  That “story” could be an opening scene or two, or it could be looser piece of writing where you try to pin down the story as a whole.  I only ask that it be intelligible enough for me to understand, as I will be reading these and advising you on which would make the best stories for you to pursue, and that it be an earnest attempt at creating a short story for a real audience.

Of course you are allowed to make use of the Generating Exercises, the ones in Making Shapely Fiction, and I will load even more exercises to your Dropbox file, if you need something to go on.  Use them or don’t—it doesn’t matter to me.  All that matters is that you write, write, write!

I am eager to see what you come up with! 

Dropbox

Last week I sent invitations to all of you to join the class Dropbox. Please accept the invitation, but just in case it didn't go through and you want to take a look at the exercises for this week, try here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/te5j130tjrkplvj/AABOSqNgWxq3l_8oyf43cl47a?dl=0

I have added our workshop schedule to this website, and edited the Conversational Topics page to account for all the different groups. Please get in contact with your group to discuss how you want to handle your discussion.

Also, please read over the supplemental material about the reading I put up on the last post.

See you tomorrow.

To Enhance This Week's Reading

This week we are reading stories from The New Yorker by Maile Meloy and Louise Erdrich. I'd like us to not only study the stories I assign you by themselves, but also in the context of the careers of the writers who wrote these stories, and where they were published.

The New Yorker

We'll talk more about The New Yorker in class for the next few days, but notice that five out of the twenty stories in the Best American come from The New Yorker. This says something about the quality of the work they publish--and also, I suspect, the taste of the editors of BASS. Check out the actually-pretty-good Wikipedia page on the New Yorker for more about its history. 

As we read the next three stories in class, let's try to figure out what similarities these stories have. What makes a "New Yorker" story?

Maile Meloy

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. She has also written a trilogy for young readers, beginning with The Apothecary, which was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2012 E.B. White Award. Meloy’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists.  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Click here to read this very interesting interview with Meloy in The Fiction Writers Review. 

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Click here to read a long, but wonderful interview with Louise Erdrich in The Paris Review.

Victor Lodato

Victor Lodato is a playwright, poet, and novelist.  His book, Mathilda Savitch, was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel” and was deemed a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor,Booklist, and The Globe and Mail.  The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries. Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Short Stories. His new novel, Edgar and Lucy, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.

As a playwright, he is the recipient of the Weissberger Award for Motherhouseand the PEN USA Award for Arlington (a collaboration with composer Polly Pen). Other plays include Wildlife, Dear Sara Jane, The Bread of Winter, and Slay the Dragon.  Other honors include the Helen Merrill Award, John Golden Prize, Roger L. Stevens Award from The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the Julie Harris Playwriting Award. His work has been produced and developed nationally and internationally at venues such as Vineyard Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival), Manhattan Theatre Club, The Guthrie Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Conservatory Theatre, Primary Stages, The National Theatre (London), Quartieri dell’Arte Festival (Rome), and Theatre Na Zabradli (Prague).

Victor lives in Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

Click here to read an interview that Victor gave in the New Yorker about "Jack, July."

A Few Things

It was such a pleasure to meet you all today! I am excited to hear from the rest of you about your talents, skills, and passions! 

In my rush to give you all the information today, there were a few things I forgot to mention:

ü  Turn off or silence cell phones during class. Because common sense.

ü  No laptops or ipads unless we are specifically using them. You may bring one, but it must be turned off and put away until I have us do in-class writing. Otherwise I get paranoid that you're on Instagram while I'm talking.

ü  Genre v. no genre—I prefer no genre for this class, as a rule, just because of my expertise.  I believe learning to write literary fiction will help you if you want to become a genre writer. I myself am a prime example of that. But I can be reasoned with. If you want to write genre, talk to me about it.

ü  See me before you kill off any characters.

Welcome!

Welcome to English 407: Advanced Fiction Writing!

If you're reading this page you are enrolled (or have been invited to participate in) this advanced fiction short story course at Boise State University.

I'm Cynthia Hand, the instructor for the course. See the Professor page for more information about me and how you can get in contact with me throughout the semester.

Also, please take a minute RIGHT NOW to subscribe to this page, so that you will receive notice whenever I post anything you need to know. Just put your preferred email in the Follow By Email section in the column on your right.

Then take a minute to purchase your books, if you haven't already (they should be available at the BSU bookstore), which you can do by clicking on the books on the Required Reading list at the column on your right.

So, a little basic information about the course. In this class we will:

• Write. In the next fifteen weeks you'll write and workshop two literary short stories, the goal being that at the end of the course you will have revised one of these stories to be good enough to submit to a literary journal. We'll also do a myriad of writing exercises along the way.

• Read. A lot. At the end of this class you'll have read 16 published short stories, a book of the craft of the short story, and 28 unpublished stories written by your peers. Your eyes will be tired.

• Learn the ins and outs of publishing across the different genres, but focused especially on literary fiction. Nearly every week we will discuss a different topic that's related to publishing and/or the advancement of a writer's career. 

• Talk to the pros. We'll get to chat with the managing editor of a literary journal, a literary agent, and a real-live Big Four publishing house editor. Come with questions.

• Discuss a writer's education in its many forms: MFAs, crit groups, conferences, mentors, and good books and references for self study. 

• Learn what literary journals are, how they work, and why that's important. We will study all kinds of different literary journals, and you will research them yourself and pick one to submit to at the end of the semester.

• Actually try to get published. Yep, that's right. When your portfolio is due at the end of the semester, you'll bring your polished-up short story in, along with your submission letter and a SASE to be MAILED OFF to a journal after it's graded.

Eager to get started?  Check out the Syllabus for more information.

See you in class! Be sure to bring some paper and something to write with, because oh, yeah, we'll be writing on the first day.