Week 3: Fiction Workshop

Our fiction workshop went quite well! Olivia showed a clip from The Devil Wears Prada to show how to create an impression of a character based on the way people act around them, and then talked about plot maps a little bit. Abby then gave her lecture on creating round characters, which involves having a backstory, a starting event, an end goal, and actions taken to reach that goal. Finally, I used an exercise that I learned from Mr Harris's Art of Fiction class. I started by having the students write a short scene out of entirely dialogue, as in only the spoken words and nothing else. Then, I had the students go back and add in the descriptive language (they said, they tilted their head, etc). The purpose of this exercise is to show how dialogue itself should be the backbone of the scene, and the descriptive language used should elevate the dialogue rather than being the foundation. I also stressed the importance of having some sort of dynamic change over the conversation, such as a build or release of tension.

After this exercise, we had the students write a flash fiction piece in an hour. The goal was not for them to create some sort of amazing story, but rather to get used to the idea of thinking about individual people within their own world. Since we made this assignment, we also had to grade it, and it was really interesting getting to read everyone's pieces. Since this was towards the end of the class, I tried to make most of my feedback revolving around each student's final project. We had spent time in one on one meetings with each student to discuss their ideas, so I could provide meaningful feedback for each piece.

Overall this workshop went quite well, and I think we all learned from our previous workshops and created one that was really engaging, as evidenced by the quality of the pieces the students wrote!