CRW 221 Artful Prose in Fiction Writing
This course will focus on the sentence as the building block of fiction writing. Additionally, we will study the relationship between linguistics and narrative structures. In daily discussions of assigned readings, we will examine how syntactic patterns work in examples by well-known authors. In weekly writing exercises, students will apply what they have learned with an eye toward developing more distinctive prose styles and, ultimately, more resonant fiction-writing. A portfolio of short stories, including new and radically revised pieces, is due at finals. This is a fiction-writing course appropriate for creative writing students at any level. As the novelist, Don Delillo wrote: “This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences.”