Tuesday July 27 *online at 630pm * RSVP

Free demo session. (Paid 5-week course is 5 consecutive Tuesdays starting August 17.)

This course on stylistic technique for creative writers. Unique to this course, we will use insights from modern linguistics to form the “building-blocks” for our kick-ass sentences.

Rather than seeing style as some function of inspiration or authorial personality, this course sees style as a consequence of knowable and usable mechanics of language.

The goal of this course is to empower students to write whatever-the-hell-style they want. We have two main goals:

1. Rather than what some “correct” stylistic practice looks like, students learn how language creates stylistic effects.
2. Students learn useful properties of language, examine their exploitation by other authors, and practice using them through short-form writing exercises.

The best account of these “useful properties” is found in the field of “stylistics,” which is a rather interdisciplinary (and new) sub-field of linguistics. While we will eschew new terminology and auxiliary concepts where possible, expect rapid exposure to new and sometimes complex ideas. Lectures will tend to have an abstract and philosophical character.

The focus of this course is on style. We will spend a lot of time looking at individual sentences or paragraphs. As such course is less interested in the “larger” concerns of, i.e., plotting. Expect to learn more about character “voice” than character design.

We will study some extreme deviations: Beckett, Burroughs, Pynchon, as well as mainstream examples across various genres.

Planned Course Topics:

- Why metaphors are everywhere
- The sound of a sentence
- Parallelism and deviation (inside and out)
- Conflict? Tension? Reader Attention!

Things to Know:

Students will be expected to perform assignments between classes. These will include readings (generally expect less than twenty pages) and hands-on short-form writing exercises. Students will occasionally be obligated to share their results with the class. These “workshop” sections will be emphatically non-critical. I plan to host some additional “office hours” which can be more workshop-focused, demand depending.

Most of the class examples will be prose, and discussion will sometimes assume the particulars of fiction (but no particular fiction genre). Writers of plays, poetry, non-fiction/memoir, etc. will find the course useful; dedicated students of poetry are likely to be familiar with some of the material.

Each weekly course session will last between ninety minutes and two hours.

Course sessions will meet weekly on zoom or discord; both of these services are free to use.