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Fictional Narrative Basics - Beginning
Completion Date: End of Week 1
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It's been my experience that most people who want to write already know much of what they need to know. We spend our lives surrounded by narrative--books, movies, television, sporting events--all of which serve up stories that engage us in real or fictional events and the characters who live through them. We are also accustomed to using narrative in explaining our world to one another, through family legends, diaries, and stories of daily events.
Narrative is so familiar that many beginning fiction writers have difficulty seeing it for what it is--a way of communicating that has a set of rules and conventions developed over time. Readers are accustomed to these rules, and writers--if they understand the conventions and work with them well--can shape stories to affect readers in different ways.
Part of the task of learning to write fiction well is learning to talk about conventions that as readers we have understood implicitly, but as writers must know explicitly. We must have a language for talking about them, and an understanding that guides us in drafting and making changes to our stories. One aim of this course is to make explicit those things that you don't know you already know about fiction.
The conventions of fiction writing, though, are in constant flux. Over time, writers bend rules and break them, invent new ones, and employ old ones in new ways. Beyond developing a language for talking about how stories have been written in the past, we are going to work towards new understandings of stories, and development of new vocabularies.
Most importantly, we are going to use this language for the conventions of fictional narrative to help us to write, redraft, and talk about our own stories.
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