4-Week Online Workshop: The Elements of Fiction, Starts May 1st, 2021

Begins Saturday, May 1, 2021

Open to All writers!

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower right) to talk with us.

Taught by Kritika Pandey, the overall winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. You can read her recent story "The Great Indian Tee and Snakes" published in Granta. Kritika is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Jharkhand, India, a graduate of the MFA for Poets and Writers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and recepient of a 2020 emerging writer grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

This course is intended to understand how to pass time in works of fiction in an organic manner, how to better explore character through perspective and contrast, and how dialogue accomplishes multiple tasks at once.

We will also understand the role of brevity in writing, how to cultivate it, why repetition is an important element for narrative coherence, and how our lack of knowledge about what is to come next is not an impediment but a generative tool for fiction. All in all, we will learn writing techniques that confirm and unsettle our expectations even as they enrich our works.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class is entirely asynchronous with weekly deadlines and there is plenty of interaction with Kritika and your peers within Wet Ink, our dedicated online classroom. Craft materials, lectures, reading assignments, and writing prompts are all available through the online classroom. Students also post work and provide and receive feedback within the online classroom environment. You can get the work done as you see fit week-to-week, so it is perfect for any schedule. There are discussion questions each week inspired by the assigned readings and topics in the lecture notes. Students are encouraged to take these wherever is most compelling and/or useful for them. Each writer will have one opportunity to workshop a piece of writing, receiving detailed feedback from their peers as well as Kritika; follow-up questions and conversations often occur. Kritika engages with these discussions throughout the week.

• Instructor: Kritika Pandey
  

• Class size limited to 15 writers

• Class Starts May 1, 2021
  

• Course is fully ONLINE; students can work according to their own schedule within weekly deadlines. Once you have enrolled the instructor will send you a link to our online classroom, provided via Wet Ink.

Instructor Kritika Pandey is a Pushcart-nominated writer from Jharkhand, India, and a graduate of the MFA for Poets and Writers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the recipient of a 2021 residency grant at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico and a 2020 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the overall winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, having been shortlisted for the prize in 2018 as well as 2016. Her works have appeared in Granta, The Common, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Raleigh Review, and UCity Review, among others, and have been translated into Malayalam, Italian, Bengali, Marathi, and Pashto.