Jump Start. Reset. Recharge. Fiction Writing Intensive with James Sallis
Date(s): Saturdays, August 4 - 11, 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Location: Piper Writers House, 450 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281
Type(s): Lecture, Seminar
Genre and Form(s): Crime Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction
About the Class
Join renowned writer James Sallis for a two-day, eight-hour intensive course on the fundamentals of writing good fiction— including the foundation, cornerstones, edges, and walls. Writers will gather over two half day sessions to get moving, get back on track, and get motivated to write! This intensive course will cover an overview of the multitude of choices you have as a fiction writer and how those choices interconnect to give a story its specific signature, density, and weight.
Sallis and students will open the fiction toolbox together, hold up each tool, and talk both about what these tools are generally used for as well as what they can be used for. The focus over the two days will be on beginning choices: how much of the story to tell, where to start, whose story is it, how to recognize clichés, saying no to Central Casting, leaving space, learning to cut away unused limbs, bringing the reader into the story, and approaches to setting, characterization, dialogue, timeline, and backstory. The course will examine the story that lies beneath the story, tucked away out of sight, and what gives this story substance.
