Leslie is currently taking a 6-month sabbatical from teaching
to complete her second short story collection: December 2024-May 2025.
SUMMER & FALL Course Schedules TBA
RIPE FRUIT III
GROWING THE SHORT STORY
You want to write that stop-them-in-their-tracks short story? Let me tell you a secret. It’s not the content that counts. It’s HOW YOU TELL IT. By starting from the ground up, you will learn to tell a great story; a story that engages your reader sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page so that, in the end, they are changed by it.
YOU WILL:
- Discover how to transform resonant personal experience into powerful story.
- Develop your skills in creating rich and exciting language.
- Practice the principles central to the craft of writing fiction: character development, voice, point of view, story line and final meaning.
- Take risks with camera angle, linguistic texture, and story structure
COURSE SYLLABUS
WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION
What’s It All About?: Class Overview & Structure
Awakening Perception: The Vitality of the Heart
Remembering Incident
Potent Words, Shimmering Images
WEEK 2: LOCATING STORY
Seeing Story in the Familiar: Vignette to Story
Versions: Angles of Incidence
WEEK 3: TRANSLATING TRUTH INTO FICTION
Amazing Stories
Is It a True Story?: Drama that Happened and Drama You Invent
WEEK 4: SHORT STORY AS GENRE
Seeing Story in the Unfamiliar
Whose Story Is It?: Narrative Points of View
About Short Story
WEEK 5: CHARACTER: INVENTING THE TRUTH
Biography: “Creative Wrong Memory” as a Source of Art Character + Situation = Momentum
Sprouting Seeds: Developing Your Short Story
WEEK 6: FIRST PERSON: DEVELOPING CHARACTER OUT OF VOICE
Hearing Voices: Speaking in Tongues
Primary Colors of Story: Character, Obsession, Obstacle
Understanding Your Characters Through Monologue
WEEK 7: THE PLOT THICKENS
Personal Secrets
Situation to Plot
Developing Your Characters: Telling Details – Metaphor & Hard Facts
WEEK 8: DIALOGUE
Loosening the Tongue: Writing a Scene in Dialogue Only
Revealing Dialogue: Dialogue as Art, Not Talk
Mainlining Your Story
Getting Unstuck: Traveling Outside the Story to Get In
WEEK 9: LAUGHTER AND LUST
Humor & Sex
Final Meaning
Evaluation
Prerequisite: Ripe Fruit I & Ripe Fruit 2 or writing experience is required.
