Writing Workshops

Fiction Bootcamp: Remixing Narrative Structure from Beginning to End with Jackson Bliss

$545

8 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 7:00 pm EDT - 9:00 pm EDT May 7 to June 25, 2026

Online via Zoom.

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Many workshops have a narrative orthodoxy that a story must have a beginning, middle, and end. Without that arc—so the argument goes—you don’t have a story.

If that’s your view of short stories, by all means, write that way! This course, however, has no craft orthodoxy when it comes to narrative structure. Instead, it’s aimed at supporting and encouraging you to write your stories however they emerge—whether that is straight-up narrative, conceptual or experimental, character-based, stylized, voice-driven, metafictional, post-modern, surreal, historically based, genre, or something in between.

The goal of this generative/revision course isn’t to teach you how to write like someone else. It’s to identify what you do best, and help you do it even better. Each participant will have slightly different journeys and goals, but everyone will do three things: begin six new drafts for six short pieces, salvage one “stuck” draft, polish and revise several late-stage drafts—a different take on beginnings, middles, and endings.

Course Outline:

The workshop will be split into the following sections:

Beginnings: Writers will be given a prompt, rule, concept, or constraint that helps them generate a new draft. Time will tell if these early drafts turn into novels or memoirs—but the goal in this workshop will be to slowly develop those idea
Middle: Students will be asked to dig up an old draft that feels unfinished, whether a short story or chapter from an unfinished novel or part of an essay (or other creative nonfiction draft). Don’t pick work that is done or recent. Don’t pick work that’s published or that’s flowing nicely either. Pick a draft that feels like a dead end. Something you’ve been working on where you feel stuck. These workshops are for creatively salvaging work that you have basically given up on—an important skill to learn.
End: For “end” workshops, participants will pull finished or near-finished drafts to do one of two things: find the place where your story feels finished compared to where you actually ended it (often they’re not the same place), or put on your heartless critic hat and cut your sentences down to their most succinct and necessary forms. In this revision mode, you will cut the fluff, the fat, the redundancy, the polemics, the exposition—anything that isn’t absolutely essential to say because it is already implied or stated.

Teaching Style: I believe in a balanced workshop where students can center their own learning, help one another, and flourish, but also where instructors can support, coach, and push students to improve their craft.

Level: Advanced

This course is held online via Zoom.

Led by

Jackson Bliss

Jackson Bliss

Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose and the mixed-race/Nisei author of the bestselling short-story collection, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021) the backwards novel, Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), which was a 2022 Foreword Reviews Book of the Day, and the choose-your-own-adventure memoir, Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), which was a 2022 Book of the Year by the Independent Book Review. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Columbia Journal, the Offing, Longreads, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, and Fiction, among others.

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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