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Discussion Units - Introduction
This course has been divided into four discussion units. Move through these units in the order listed, but within each unit, except "Getting and Giving Help," chart your own route through the material and follow your own interests. As part of the course requirements, you will provide critical reflections that map the route you chose through each discussion unit. The discussion units are as follows:
Fictional Narrative Basics -- For this unit, you will complete writing exercises that will enable you to start writing the story required for this class. You'll use these exercises as a guide to the four basic components of fictional narrative: character, point of view, plot, and description. As a class, you will be working to develop a critical vocabulary for discussion of these elements, which will form the foundation for discussions throughout the rest of the class.
Getting and Giving Help -- In this unit, you will learn how to use your developing critical vocabulary to discuss one another's stories in a constructive and useful manner.
Managing Fictional Narrative Flow -- This unit provides you with additional vocabulary and tools for working with fictional narrative issues such as pacing, scene development, dialogue, and prose style. You will examine how each one of these elements serves to support the central goal of keeping the reader actively engaged in the story.
Fiction and the Real World -- Both critical language and tradition place fictional narrative in a special relationship with "reality" or human experience. Often in critique, you will hear that events in a story are not "realistic," or that a character "would never behave that way." Fiction is also read in a real world of social and political forces, in which narrative plays a role. This discussion unit explores aspects of this special relationship between fiction and lived experience; you will looks at various perspectives that are applied to the critiquing of fiction, discuss the role of research with respect to writing fictional narrative, examine the underpinnings of Realism as a fictional movement; and you'll look at how to go about getting your writing out into the world through publication.
There will be assignments imbedded within each section. A complete list of course assignments is compiled in the Assignments section of the course web site.
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