Advanced Fiction: Writing the Novel

This is an intensive course in the craft of writing a novel. In an anthology called Writers on Writing, Doris Lessing wrote: "There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be." Though each novel creates a world all its own for readers to live in, the novelist can work toward mastering a set of reliable skills for the novel to be a satisfying, believable world, one that sustains the reader's interest from first page to last. The focus of this advanced fiction course is to teach novelists these skills through class discussion, close-reading, writing exercises, and workshop sessions. In the beginning of the course, students complete and share with the class a series of exercises to frame and set their novel's vision; then we move into workshopping excerpts of each novel in small groups, polishing the excerpts through revision. At the end of the course, students present a reading of their work and turn in a final, polished draft of one chapter of their novel-in-progress.