This is an online workshop that takes place via Zoom

 

Novella Writing 101

From Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street, the novella tells a profound, more expansive tale than a short story, in a form intentionally more condensed than the novel. The novella is a complex narrative form that trains its lens on a concise exploration of a particular theme, set of characters or relationships and emotions. Writing a novella requires a grasp of the craft elements of long-form storytelling, such as understanding of plot, character development and dialogue techniques. But additionally, successful long-form writing needs a plan for turning great ideas into great sentences and a community of other writers to help us keep going.

In this ten-week course, aimed at generating a complete draft of a novella, we’ll spend the first two weeks building a sustainable writing practice through generative exercises, brainstorming our projects, and studying excerpts taken from great works by authors such as Juan Rulfo, Jane Smiley, Andre Dubus, James Joyce, and Marguerite Duras. The rest of the class will focus on workshopping student work that we’ll produce each week at a pace aimed at completing a manuscript. We will start small and let the characters tell us what’s next. Each participant will also read one complete novella and “teach” it to the class in a pair with another classmate. Whether you’re starting with a new idea for a story or need a fresh perspective on a long-form fiction project you’ve been working on, you’ll have the opportunity to finish the class with the draft of a novella, the confidence to keep going, and a solid plan for how to take your project to the next level.