HOW THE COURSE WORKS

Work in this course will be structured as follows. During each week, students will be asked to accomplish three main tasks at home: 1) an assigned reading of a published work (usually a short story or novel extract) that will be discussed in class; 2) regular journal entries; and 3) a short, take-home writing assignment, to be read aloud by the student, in the following week’s class.  Throughout the period that the course takes place, each students is also encouraged to work on a longer, on-going work of fiction.  As these progress, portions or drafts of them may be featured in part during one of the weekly sessions.  The final class session will also focus upon these works.

During each class session after the first week, two students will be pre-assigned to present (i.e. read to the class) a written critique of the assigned reading.  (click here for suggested guidelines).  Students will also be given the opportunity to discuss what they are doing in their journal work, although the reading of journal entries will not be required.

In addition to the above, each week's class session will focus upon a separate aspect or element of fiction writing that will be the topic of a brief  'lecture' and discussion.  Also, the assigned written exercise from the previous week will be discussed.  

After the fourth or the fifth week, the class will also feature a discussion of the longer work of two or three different volunteer students (each week), whose work will be pre-distributed during the preceding week, so that students can read it prior to coming to class.

At times, brief in-class exercises will also be incorporated into class sessions.

Weekly assigned exercises will not be collected.  However, students seeking occasional feedback are welcome to submit them or to submit brief selections from their on-going work for review by the instructors.

Also, a private Yahoo discussion group website shall be set up, so that students in this class may 1) upload and download written selections that are to be pre-distributed, 2) share and discuss on line their work between and among each other, 3) seek and obtain feedback from each other.