Story Technique – A Hands-on Investigation
Open to all
Limited to 12 participants
“The only way … to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then to try to discover what you have done.” Flannery O’Connor
This eight-week workshop will investigate the short story form. Using five truly great realist and speculative short stories as reference, we’ll do a quick review of the basic building blocks of story-writing: things like detail, narrative point of view, and elements of time and place. Then we’ll investigate technical innovations with an eye to attempting something new in our own fiction. Workshop time will be split between discussing technique in published models, and reading and discussing our own stories.
As soon as you have registered for this workshop, please submit a single WORD document containing the following information to [email protected] with the subject line “For Claire Rothman”:
- A short paragraph about yourself.
- A sentence about what you hope to get from this workshop.
Story Technique will be taught online on Zoom. You’ll need a computer and a decent online connection. We will keep things interactive, with participants pairing up in break-out rooms for one-on-one exchanges, and also giving short presentations to the group.
You will receive links to the five stories we’ll be using as models. Reading them before our start date is strongly recommended.
Claire Holden Rothman is a Montreal writer, translator, and fiction editor, whose third novel, Lear’s Shadow (2018) won the 2019 Vine Award for Jewish Canadian Fiction and was short-listed for the 2020 Jacob Isaac Segal Award. Other novels include My October (2014), shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award and nominated for a Scotiabank Giller prize, and The Heart Specialist (2009), also nominated for the Giller. She has taught fiction workshops at McGill and Bishop’s Universities. For many years, she taught English literature and creative writing at Marianopolis College in Montreal.