Writing Workshops

Story Structure: A Close Investigation with Debra Jo Immergut

$295

4 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Mondays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT February 5 to February 26, 2024

Online via Zoom

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This workshop has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Randy Winston at [email protected].

How do writers take a promising idea—a precious lump of clay—and coax it into a shapely, satisfying narrative? This question will guide our work together in this course, designed for writers of fiction or nonfiction. At each meeting, we’ll break down a contemporary or classic story, investigating its architecture via structural mapping and detailed diagrams. Through illustrated lecture and group discussion, we’ll consider a variety of story shapes, including shapes that are barely perceptible, exploring work by Souvankham Thammavongsa, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shanteka Sigers, Rivka Galchen, Michael Cunningham, and more.

The goal of this course is to analyze storytelling strategies and practice them, and writers of all levels are welcome. In the latter part of each class, we’ll write, helped along by prompts inspired by our readings and discussions. We’ll play with openings, turns, and endings, generating new work or adding to works in progress. The course will conclude with a salon-style reading. You’ll leave the course with new pages and a road map toward a finished story or project.

Course Outline

Session I: Beginnings: The map vs. the trip
Session II: Emergence: Struggle vs. flow
Session III: Furthering: Contrast, cumulative effects, reconsidering the turn
Session IV: Endings: Resolution, refusal, resonance

Led by

Debra Jo Immergut

Debra Jo Immergut

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the novels You Again, named a New York Times Best of the Year and shortlisted for the 2021 Gotham Book Prize, and The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist and published in over a dozen countries. She has also published a collection of short fiction, Private Property. Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, the New York Times, PANK, Hobart, and elsewhere. A recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships, she has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in western Massachusetts.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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