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.