Before you can tell a great story, you need to know who is telling it. Are you working with a hero or an antihero? Are they a reliable or unreliable narrator? What does a first-person voice allow and prevent, compared to a third-person voice? Would multiple voices enhance or confuse the heart of your book? We are going to pressure-test the ideas you have of your own work, and make sure any decisions you’ve made are the best options to commit to. We’ll discuss the challenge of making sure a character’s voice isn’t just your own, and we’ll look to examples of how voice develops through novels to demonstrate the kind of character development and transformation that makes great fiction. 

The sentence is the primary engine of meaning and emotional charge in fiction. Through close readings of writers with distinct styles we’ll examine how syntax, diction and rhythm create momentum and mood, and discover how sentence level decisions can deepen and enliven the novel as a whole.

The way time works in fiction is often strange. Writers need to establish authority and trust with a reader quickly if they are going to take great leaps through a lifetime. And there are common challenges and pitfalls to avoid in all genres. Flashbacks and flashforwards can come across as leaky bandaids or profound bursts of insight. The ideal structure of a character’s story will often only reveal itself as the words pile up, but the ability to diagnose what’s not working in temporality is one of the most valuable skills in the novelist’s toolkit.

The novel form gives writers the space and scope to create a rich, immersive world. But how much detail is too much? Where is the line between vivid and overwritten? Through close reading and discussion we’ll examine the power of concrete language and precise sensory detail and look at how imagery and metaphor can make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. We’ll also talk about the role of research in finding details to transform tired description into arresting, visceral prose.

Rapture is a totally astonishing novel. I tore through it the first time I read it, yet it is one of those rare works of art that is totally timeless and rewards revisiting. How Maguire manages to make me feel I lived an entire lifetime in so few pages is a supreme example of mastery of the novel form. She brought these humans from so many centuries ago into my body, made me feel their desire and hunger, their confusion and pain and longing. I don’t share any of their conceptions of God and yet I understood completely their longing for the sublime and for connection.

I’ve been teaching for many years now, and in my experience only the best literature can withstand rigorous dissection and discussion. Rapture is great literature and I’m so excited for us to dig into its plentiful joys and lessons together.

When I first read Seed I was gripped from the opening line to the final page, completely immersed into a world far removed from my own. As I read, life in an Antarctic seed vault became so vivid that I’d look up from the book and feel momentarily disoriented by the green outside my window. That experience alone made me want to understand how Lee achieved it, but what takes Seed to the next level is that this propulsive, nail-biting storytelling also opens up a nuanced exploration of some of the most urgent problems and deepest ethical questions we face as humans living in the world right now.

I can’t wait to crack into the craft that makes Seed so compelling and consider how novelists working in all kinds of genres can borrow and adapt from Lee.