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8-Week Fiction Workshop: Writing Emotion

It’s been said that good art’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, which raises interesting questions about the emotional power of narrative. How can we craft fiction that feels genuinely moving to readers, rather than sentimental or exploitative? How do we channel emotion from our own lives into writing, and how do we imagine the experiences of others in convincing ways? Emotional engagement with characters and situations is often what keeps us reading. Yet the question of how to get emotion on the page is often not directly addressed in craft workshops. In this one, we’ll put our hearts and our heads together to reflect on how language and form makes us feel.

We’ll look at a range of short fiction that aims to strike readers in various affective registers— from the sharp and spare, to the lush and lyrical, to the strange and haunting. We’ll discuss how psychological complexity, imagery, dialogue, and rhythm contribute to emotional resonance. Craft exercises and workshops will be flexibly structured to fit your needs and interests at this moment. You can work on developing fiction already in progress in order to amp up its emotional power, or you can focus on generating new, passion-driven prose. Whether you hope people will cry or laugh or scream or get a quiet burst of delight from your words, we’ll serve as sympathetic readers and sounding boards for writing you care about.

Class meetings will be held over video chat, using Zoom accessed from your private class page. While you can use Zoom from your browser, we recommend downloading the desktop client so you have access to all platform features.

Check out this page for details about payment plans and discount opportunities.  

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

- Insight into the craft of creating emotionally engaging fiction

- Generative prompts from our readings to help spark emotionally-driven writing

- Optional one-on-one conference with instructor

- Detailed feedback on one or two stories or novel excerpts

- 10% discount on all future Catapult classes

COURSE EXPECTATIONS:

Participants will read one or two stories or craft essays for every weekly session and can choose to try out related creative exercises. For our first workshop, everyone will submit a story or novel excerpt of up to 20 double-spaced pages. The second workshop will be individually tailored to each writer’s particular interests and concerns. You can choose to submit another story or novel excerpt, a full or partial revision of your first submission, a critical question for us to discuss, a creative problem you’d like to talk through, or anything else that you think might help with your current projects and writing challenges. Thoughtful commenting on all of the workshop submissions is an essential part of the course.

COURSE SKELETON:

Week 1: Introductions and Flash Fiction

Week 2: Emotionally-Driven Stories

Week 3: Lyrical Narratives

Week 4: Write it Colder: The Power of Spareness

Week 5: Revision

Week 6: Character Complexity

Week 7: Imagery and Precision

Week 8: Humor and Strangeness

Polly Rosenwaike

Polly Rosenwaike’s story collection, Look How Happy I’m Making You, was published by Doubleday, and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Short Story Collections of 2019” and Amazon’s “Best Books of 2019 for Literature and Fiction.” Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Glimmer Train, New York Magazine’s The Cut, the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Millions, and Lit Hub. Currently the Fiction Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review, she lives in Ann Arbor.