MFA Fiction Workshop (497-0-20)
Instructors
Chris Abani
Meeting Info
University Hall 118: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
The primary text for English 497, the Fiction Workshop, is the work written by the people in the class. Writing is the only art with an abstract medium: language. But like every other art, writing is about making something. Musicians make music, potters make pots, painters make paintings, and writers make stories and novels. One learns to make pots through the trial and error of making pots. The analogy holds for writing; one learns to write by doing: writing and rewriting. It is the craft of each art that can be learned, and it is craft that the artist relies on to make and improve a piece. And so the writing workshop is craft oriented. Because the medium, language, is an abstraction, the tools of writing stories--which are central to human thought--are not pens or typewriters or computers, but abstractions: scenic construction, dialogue, etc. That's what governs improving one's in-process work and that is what we come together to discuss in each class. The stories that people in the class are working on will organically lead to discussions about the craft of writing that will apply not just to that particular story, but to the art of writing in general--to all our stories. In critiquing a fellow writer's story, one is also, on the deepest level, engaged in articulating a personal aesthetic. The idea of a workshop is to then harness the clarity of those personal articulations back into one's own writing.