No matter whether you’re writing a linear or nonlinear narrative, the way time is structured in fiction shapes how readers understand everything from character to plot to setting. Exploring the work of writers like Aimee Bender, Venita Blackburn, and George Saunders, this workshop will examine how authors expand and compress time, and ways they weave past, present, and future together. Our conversations will also focus on topics ranging from character development, plot, voice, and setting. Additionally, in our workshops we will explore how time functions in your own work. Those sessions will focus on all aspects of each writer’s submission, including character development, prose, voice, and plot structure. Writers will leave this class with an understanding of how to structure time in their work along with a roadmap with which to revise their submissions. This class is suitable for writers with all levels of experience.
*No class on Nov. 24th
Class meetings will be held over video chat, using Zoom accessed from your private class page. While you can use Zoom from your browser, we recommend downloading the desktop client so you have access to all platform features.
COURSE TAKEAWAYS:
- Examine and engage with various techniques used to represent time in fiction, while also exploring other elements of craft in our discussions of published stories
- Through close reading, understand how the writers we’re studying and the writers in the workshop structure their stories and develop character
- The opportunity to workshop at least one short story or novel excerpt
- 10% discount on all future Catapult classes
COURSE EXPECTATIONS:
Weekly readings: between 10-20 pages of published fiction
Weekly workshops: carefully read each submission and provide the writer with detailed written feedback on submissions up to 25 double-spaced pages long
COURSE SKELETON:
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: Compression
Week 3: Zooming In
Week 4: Vignettes
Week 5: The Past and Future
Week 6: Playing with Time
Thomas Grattan’s novel The Recent East, published by MCD Books/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, was a New York Times editor’s choice, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Novel Prize. His new novel In Tongues is forthcoming from MCD Books/ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His short fiction has appeared in several publications, including One Story, Slice, and The Colorado Review. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in New York City. (photo credit: David Horne)
“A wonderful, immersive debut novel . . . Our lives are time spent, and it’s a deep, expansive pleasure to spend a little of ours as these characters spend their own. Most extraordinarily, Grattan gives us not only life, but a good life, the rarity of which in fiction (and increasingly, reality) is a shame.”
“Sharply accomplished . . . Grattan’s rarer achievement is to have written a historical novel whose when and where, however well established, are not really determinative, and whose people remain individual riddles instead of political integers.”
“Dazzling, deeply loving, obscenely clever prose . . . It’s all the small details tossing around this continent-tossed family that makes this novel such a joy.”
“Tom’s feedback was both extremely helpful and motivating.”
“Tom is a warm and thoughtful reader and facilitator.”