Lessons

  • Lesson 1: Getting Started. This lesson encourages you to begin thinking like a writer and observing the world as a writer, which includes keeping a journal.
  • Lesson 2: How to Tell a Story. This lesson introduces the different ways of conveying a story, particularly focusing on the difference between showing and telling, using detail, and the mechanics of language and style.
  • Lesson 3: Creating and Conveying Character. This lesson delves into the topic of characterization, focusing on direct methods of showing character, such as dialogue, action, and appearance.
  • Lesson 4: Character Representation. This lesson continues discussion of characterization, focusing on indirect methods of character representation, such as interpretation, credibility, and complexity.
  • Lesson 5: Where Are We? This lesson explores place and atmosphere, techniques for describing both, how place can reveal conflict and character, and symbolism imbedded within setting.
  • Lesson 6: Do You Have the Time? This lesson continues discussion about setting, focusing on the concept of fictional time through discussion of summary and scene and the use of flashback.
  • Lesson 7: Story Architecture. This lesson addresses structural components of short story writing such as plot and story form by examining conflict, crisis, resolution, the story arc, points of connection and disconnection, and differences between the short story and the novel.
  • Lesson 8: Look Who's Talking. This lesson examines the many different aspects of point of view, including 1st/2nd/3rd person, audience, and narrative form and distance.
  • Lesson 9: Language Is Everything. This lesson looks closely at language on multiple levels: words and phrases, including literal and figurative language; sentences, and how they carry both meaning and rhythm; and passages, which convey theme, the essential message of a short story.
  • Lesson 10: Your Own Best Editor. This lesson discusses revision, addressing the challenges and the opportunities of the process, explaining why and how writers revisit their stories, and offering practical suggestions for revision.