The short story is one of the most demanding and rewarding forms in fiction — a world that must be built, populated, and resolved in the space of a few thousand words, with no room for waste and nowhere to hide. This course offers a firm grounding in the essential elements of fiction craft while guiding you through the process of writing a complete short story of 2,500 words. Through lectures, targeted writing exercises, and two rounds of workshop, you will learn to make deliberate choices about every aspect of your work: how to find and develop a character whose desire drives the narrative forward, how to construct a plot that asks and answers a central dramatic question, how to use point of view, setting, dialogue, and pacing as active tools rather than background elements, and how to locate and sustain a voice that is distinctly your own.
The short story rewards compression. What a novel can afford to build slowly — character, atmosphere, theme — the short story must earn quickly, often in a single scene, a single exchange, a single image that does the work of many pages. This course treats that constraint not as a limitation but as a discipline, one that sharpens your instincts as a writer and teaches you to trust the reader. By the end of six weeks, you will have a completed draft of a short story, a clearer sense of your own aesthetic, and the craft vocabulary to revise with intention.
The deadline to sign up is September 6th, 2026.
What you’ll get
Lectures on craft elements, with close readings of published work
Writing exercises targeting the skill introduced each wee
Workshop: each student presents their work in progress to the group
Details
Price: $699 total
Dates: October 6th - November 10th
Time: Tuesdays, 6:30 - 8:00 pm ET
Location: Zoom (calendar invites with links sent ahead of class)
About the instructor
David Samuel Levinson is the author of the novels Tell Me How This Ends Well and Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence. His essay “How ‘Heated Rivalry’ Thawed the Chill Between My Father and Me” appeared in Modern Love in The New York Times in February 2026, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Hobart, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, West Branch, and other publications. A recipient of a Fulbright-Mach Award, he recently returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in Vienna, Austria, where he researched and revised a new novel. He has taught creative writing at New York University, Emory University, Texas A&M University, and elsewhere.