Practicing the Basics of Fiction
Sara Houghteling
Course Meetings: Mondays, 9/24-12/3 (with no class 11/19) 6:30-9:20.
Email: available to enrolled students only
Course Overview:
Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, advises aspiring authors to approach writing fiction in gradual steps (or, in her words,
“bird by bird,”) rather than being “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” In this course, we will combine
a traditional workshop with weekly, cumulative writing exercises that tackle the basics of fiction: our study will begin
with plot, then address point-of-view, and move on to structure, dialogue, voice, and character development.
Readings by authors such as O'Connor, Chekhov, O'Brien, and Hawthorne will be linked to each week's craft lesson.
At course’s end, students will have polished a piece of short fiction, explored the beginnings of new projects, and
learned numerous techniques to keep them writing in the future. Novelist Daniel Mason, author of The Piano Tuner
and A Far Country, will visit our class as well. We'll finish the course with a party during which students will each
read five minutes' worth of their favorite prose from the past semester.
Guiding Principles, Goals, and Expectations: My goal for you for these next ten weeks is to help you advance
significantly on your novel or short story. To this end, our short weekly writing exercises are designed to give you a
range of writerly tools with which to experiment. Each is tied to that week's assigned reading. These exercises will
help keep you writing even during the fallow periods; hopefully, they're fun and interesting, too. I encourage you to
employ the characters and setting from your long-term writing project in these small assignments. I'll respond to
these weekly assignments very briefly and at length to your workshop submission.
I encourage you to write every day, if you can. What's most important for the class is that you complete
your story for workshop and your weekly reader responses to your peers' stories. This is required of everyone, even
if you're not taking the class for credit.
I hope what we read will stay with you for a long time. My goal for you is to write as much as possible.
I encourage you to come speak with me at any time about your writing or the course's trajectory.
Your Piece for Workshop: It should be roughly between 3,000 and 6,500 words (with 7,000 as the upper limit).
Please double space your work and use an easy-to-read 12-point font. Please also include a process letter to me
about your perception of the piece's strengths and challenges (more on this later). We'll sign up for workshop slots
on the first day of class. Workshop will begin on our second meeting.
Workshop Procedure:
We'll discuss this at greater length during class. To start with:
1) Bring copies of your novel chapter to class the week prior to your workshop date.
2) We will workshop between two and three manuscripts each week, depending on the class's size. I ask you that you
read all of the manuscripts carefully and come to class prepared to discuss each of them at length. You will only
have to comment on one of these manuscripts; I will assign each of you to a smaller reading group in which you all
read and comment on each other's work. For this reading group manuscript, please mark up the pages with your
constructive criticism and write a feedback letter to your peer. For the other manuscripts, please jot down three
notes for yourself: what you liked, where you would suggest the novelist focus their revisions, and either a question
or a recommendation of an area for the novelist to explore further.
1) We will discuss each novel excerpt for approximately 20-30 minutes depending on how many students are in
the class. I encourage authors to remain quiet but to take notes while their stories are being discussed. At
the end of the workshop, the author can chime in and ask questions or clarify any points of confusion.
Course Grading: The default option for this class is “No grade requested.” If you choose Credit/No Credit, your
class attendance will determine that you receive a passing grade. If you take the class for a letter grade, workshop
participation and completion of the assignments will determine your grade. You can change your grade status up
until the last meeting of our class. Please let me know if you decide to change your grade status at any point during
the semester.
Required Text: You've Got To Read This; Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe, edited by
Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard.
All other required readings are available online using MOODLE. If you have a portable reading device, I encourage
you to save paper and download these stories to your device and mark them there rather than printing the stories. If
anyone has problems obtaining these readings via MOODLE, please let me know. We're using MOODLE in lieu of
an additional coursepack.
Recommended texts: I recommend you pair our in-class reading with a craft book, though I don't have a single
one I like best. Three of my favorites are the aforementioned Bird by Bird, by Anne Lammot, and either Bringing
the Devil to His Knees, by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi or Burning Down the House, also by Charles Baxter.
Additional Expenses: On the day of your workshop, you will need to bring a copy of your novel excerpt for
everyone in the class, so please budget for this additional expense.
How to Access MOODLE:
You can access MOODLE via the website csp-moodle.stanford.edu.
You all have the same generic account with the same user/password combination of:
username: TBA
password: TBA
Please note, the first three characters of the username/password are letters and the last two are numbers. It has no
spaces and is all lower case. Please don't change the password, since this will prevent others from accessing the
account.
If you click on the course name, you'll come to a page where I'll post the texts of any reading assignments that are
not in You've Got to Read This as well as your weekly writing assignments. I'll also keep a schedule of the workshops
and the snacks online.
Course Schedule (Subject to change)
*You'll see that I've mapped out the course up until its final two weeks. Based on students' writing and questions,
we'll determine the themes and goals of these final weeks as they approach.
WEEK ONE: September 24th
Introductions.
Discussion of model authors. Character studies.
Homework: Read The Things They Carried, (Tim O'Brien). Writing Exercise One. First pieces for workshop
distributed in class.
WEEK TWO: October 1st
Plot, Scene, and Specificity of Detail
Workshop. Discuss The Things They Carried.
Homework: Read A Good Man is Hard To Find (O'Connor). Writing Exercise Two.
WEEK THREE: October 8th (we will indeed have class Columbus Day)
The Gun on the Wall: Plot, Religion, and Inexorable Fate.
Workshop. Discuss A Good Man is Hard To Find.
Homework: Read Gooseberries (Anton Chekhov). Writing Exercise Three.
WEEK FOUR: October 15th
Structure and Character I: Learning from Chekhov.
Workshop. Discuss Gooseberries.
Homework: On **MOODLE**, read Wakefield (Nathaniel Hawthorne). Writing Exercise Four.
WEEK FIVE: October 22nd
Structure and Character II: Learning from Hawthorne.
Workshop. Discuss Wakefield.
Homework: On **MOODLE**, read The Death of the Pugilist and A Registry of My Passage on the Earth (Daniel
Mason). Writing Exercise Five.
WEEK SIX: October 29th
Hearing Voices: Writing Fiction from Historical Sources
Workshop. Discuss The Death of the Pugilist and A Registry of My Passage on the Earth with author Daniel Mason.
Homework: Mini-book groups select reading. Writing Exercise Six.
WEEK SEVEN: November 5th
Scavengers
Workshop. Mini-book group meetings.
Homework: Read Paris Review interview. Writing Exercise Seven.
WEEK EIGHT: November 12th
Workshop. Writing Exercise Eight.
Homework: TBA
BREAK
No class. Happy Thanksgiving!
WEEK NINE: November 26th
TBA
WEEK TEN: December 3rd
Workshop. Goodbye Gala and Reading. Students will bring five minutes of their strongest work from the quarter to
share out loud with classmates.
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Workshop Procedure, Process Letters and Feedback Letters (with thanks to Skip Horack)
I. Feedback Letters
When a classmate’s story draft is assigned for workshop, you will respond to it with a feedback letter about
one page in length, typed. You will also return a line-edited copy of the draft to the writer. These letters
and line edits will be the basis for our workshop discussions. For those of you taking this class for a grade,
I will come around during class and check that these are completed.
Typically, your feedback letters should identify the following: (a) strengths of the draft; (b) areas for
improvement that you would like to see addressed in revision; and (c) any areas of confusion. It is also very
helpful to pose a question or two directly to the writer. In providing feedback, always remember that our
goal is to make one another better writers, as well as to encourage that pursuit.
II. Workshop Procedure
Before workshop begins, I will ask one of the other week's workshop partners (one of the other people
whose story is up for discussion that week) to choose a brief passage (usually a paragraph) from your story
to read out loud.
When your story is being workshopped, I ask that you remain quiet until the end of the discussion. At that
point, it will be your turn to pose any questions or clarify any areas of confusion. Please take notes during
your workshop. I personally find that the process of being workshopped is overwhelming enough that I'm
in a daze while it's happening—so the notes are very helpful!
In receiving feedback, take it all in. Let the comments wash over you without becoming defensive.
Consider all solutions offered to the problems in your draft. Quite often, workshop consists of watching
others point out things that you were hoping you could get away with. That’s actually a good thing, in that
it will teach you to trust that editor in your head when revising your own work.
III. Process Letters
On the day that you turn in a piece for workshop, I ask that you write me a separate note (or series of
bullet points) that address the process of writing this piece of fiction. Specifically, I would like you to tell
me two or three strengths of your piece, two or three problem spots, and two to three questions you have
about it. These help me guide our class discussion and my own recommendations so that this experience is
as helpful to you as possible!