This 400-level summative is for students who have had experience writing short stories to try their hand at longer-form fiction. Students draft outlines for a long narrative, including chapter/section summaries, character lists, settings, and plots, and then work toward completing their long stories, novellas, or the first 30 pages of their novels. We discuss the process of scaling up: what it means to develop a narrative that allows room for exploration and digression while still maintaining cohesion. We examine different approaches to the long story, novella, and novel by closely reading masterworks, such as Alice Munro’s Tricks, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, Toni Morrison's Sula, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Garth Greenwell's What Belongs To You. We also read Orhan Pamuk's extended essay The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist with a view to discussing why the novel has been and continues to be an important narrative form. Class time is spent analyzing the published works, brainstorming outlines, practicing various elements of storytelling through writing prompts and discussing the process of “scaling up”—how the micro and macro function together not just in storytelling but in students’ various artistic disciplines. Students have the opportunity to read aloud from their works-in-progress and receive spontaneous feedback from their peers and instructor. Throughout the course, discussions focus on how an individual work communicates its rules to the reader and lives up to them. As part of their final project, students reflect, either in a short essay or a creative piece, on the role of “scaling up”—what it means in their work as artists/designers.
- Teacher: Shubha Sunder