C R E AT I V E W R I T I N G Sentence by Sentence: Creating Your Style No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place. —Isaac Babel I n fiction and nonfiction narrative, what grabs readers’ and editors’ attention is style. In this course, we will develop our unique prose styles, with the aim of drawing readers deeply into our stories. We will write a variety of short exercises to experiment with language as sound, the use of rhetorical tropes, modes of narration (descriptive, internal, summary, and scene), and use of genres. Students will select authors to imitate in short exercises, to internalize the lessons that we learn from these authors’ stylistic choices. We will write and workshop short scenes to develop our unique prose styles, employing lessons about craft to create specific dramatic effects. We will learn from the work of masters like James Joyce, John Barth, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and Gertrude Stein and read about developing our styles in essays by Raymond Queneau, Francine Prose, John Gardner, and others, all with special attention to tone and point of view. Additionally, students may choose an author to study, imitate, and discuss throughout the course. t hom a S m Cn e e ly Former Jones Lecturer and Stegner Fellow, Stanford Thomas McNeely is the author of Pictures of the Shark: Stories and the novel Ghost Horse, winner of the Gival Press Novel Award. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, and his stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and other magazines and anthologies and have been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize. McNeely received an MFA from Emerson College. CW 120 W 10 weeks, June 26 – September 1 3 units, $955 Limit: 24 Refund Deadline: June 29 Course Format: Flex Online Story Time: The Key to Creative Writing E udora Welty wrote, “Time is the bringer-on of action, the instrument of change.” No story can occur without the passing of time, as every narrative covers some span of it. Creative writing can move from past to present and back again, even weaving them together. But to make these movements clear, every writer must learn how to artfully track and manipulate time. As a writer, you must determine how much time to cover, at what pace, and when to start, flash back, or jump ahead. To study a variety of strategies, we will look at examples from books taking diverse, often uncon- ventional approaches to time’s passage. We will see it begin at the end (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore), span decades (Mariana by Monica Dickens), and slowly inch forward (The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker). In other instances, we will watch time accelerate at a breathless pace (To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf) and move in reverse (Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis). Through discussion and exercises, we will learn about the effect of these varied choices on the reader, applying what we’ve learned in order to workshop student submissions of up to 5,000 words, whether they are short stories, novel excerpts, a memoir, or creative nonfiction—all genres are welcome. j u l i a pi e r p on t Author Julia Pierpont is the author of the bestselling novel Among the Ten Thousand Things, which received the Prix Fitzgerald in France. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She received an MFA from NYU. CW 89 W 10 weeks, June 26 – September 1 3 units, $955 Limit: 17 Refund Deadline: June 29 Course Format: Flex Online 49 R EGIS T R AT IO N F O R AL L C O UR S ES B EGINS ON MONDAY, MAY 22, AT 8:30 A M (P T ) R EGIS T ER O NL INE AT C O NT INUINGSTU DIES.STA NFORD.EDU