Writing Innovative Fiction: The Art of the Short Short (Online)
Taught by Joe Pfister
Joe Pfister is a writer, teacher, and Tecmo Super Bowl enthusiast living in Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in such publications as PANK, Juked, and New World Writing. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and currently serves as fiction editor for The Boiler Journal.
Flash fiction, writes Grant Faulkner, “can do in a page what a novel does in two hundred.” Not only are “short shorts” faster and (sometimes) easier to write, but they also lend themselves well to risk-taking and experimentation, particularly in our own writing. During this two-hour craft course, we will read, then discuss a half dozen short shorts (stories between 100 and 1,200 words) that exemplify some of the most exciting and innovative fiction being written today. We will hold each story beneath a microscope, challenging ourselves to rethink everything we know about writing fiction—from dialogue and character to narrative arc and compression.
