Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction /Prose

This course provides an opportunity for students to create texts and take these through editing processes that will have them writing with increased sophistication and independence. Learners will broaden their previous writing experiences and deepens skills in introspection, reflection, and intention in the writer’s use of language and organization of stories. Learners will assess written and oral story to help them understand the power of creative storytellers to help us understand the community, the world and the self. They will then practice several different forms of writing in creative non-fiction, memoirs, poetry, the short story. Through practice, students will learn to take risks and persevere as they prepare to write independent pieces that will be polished to a publishable quality for real life purposes.

Students will have the opportunity to learn and practice the craft of fiction; examine the work of modern and contemporary short story and novel writers and the forms and techniques essential to fiction.

Course Content / Outcomes– General Critical thinking about writing prose and fiction

The student in this course will be:

• writing and publishing for diverse, specialized, real-world contexts in both creative fiction; narration and prose

• exploring personal and cultural identities, memories, and stories, to deepen their understanding of themselves and their world to learn how these are the basis of writing about the human condition

• collaborating and developing skills through reading, writing, designing and editing processes shared with friends/family, classmates and the teacher

• interacting with others through reading, listening and viewing other writers’ works (professional and classmates)

• representing work in a variety of ways including speaking using media posted to the class or privately

• refining the ability to write in complex, controlled styles with effectiveness and impact with increasing independence

• engaging with a variety of worldviews, and Principles • reading many excerpts from texts and learning how mentor texts can help them grow as writers

• challenging themselves to write in genres that are new to them

• choosing areas of interest to deepen their skill in writing what they love to write

• Increasing their command of language usage, literary elements and devices, by gaining understanding of diverse texts’ forms and functions

• finding their writing voice

• studying writer’s processes to find what works for them

• learning to use metacognition to advance their understanding of texts and their own writing

• gaining perspective on the power of story and how they shape us and are shaped by us

Specific Outcomes/ Content essential for advanced writers: students will be able to:

1. identify the sources of their own imaginations

2. apply a composing process that begins with a notion (memory, image, phrase, etc.) and ends with a short story

3. control of point of view

4. write extended dialogue

5. use setting to establish a sense of reality

6. create plots that are significant and dramatic

7. identify what is useful in the critiques of your own work by other students

8. analyze the stories of modern and contemporary short story writers

10. develop a coherent portfolio of short stories.

Major Topics • imagination as a source for writing

• writing as a process

• point of view

• character development

• setting

• plot

• dialogue

• revising

• modern and contemporary poetry