Fiction Workshop II: The Narrative Personality

Undergraduate / Graduate

While aspiring writers usually grasp quickly how to write direct dialog-we hear it all around us, in public and private spaces-narration is a trickier enterprise. In this writing workshop, we will look at the narrator as personality, a voice that exists to tell the story, but not always to enter it. The narrator can be a constant, like an elbow in the side, or effaced, touching down to only give us the basics of time and place. They can be all knowing and judging, summarizing scenes, people and events from a distant, God-like vantage, or reportorial, speaking in present tense as events unfurl. Some narrators make us laugh but are conning us with their charm; others explain the psychology of events like a great therapist or moralize like a member of the clergy. We will look at a wide range of examples from writers such as Anton Chekhov, Louise Erdrich, Nicholai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, ZZ Packer, and Edith Wharton. Students will be encouraged to experiment with narrative voice in both writing exercises and story revisions. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story, which you will revise for the final.