October 6th - November 10th, 2026
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.
October 6th - November 10th, 2026
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.