Writing and Disrupting Short Fiction

auckland online

Writing and Disrupting Short Fiction

w/ Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu)

Explore the communal act of short story writing in this six-week course with award-winning author Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu), learning how to deepen your connection to craft and each other and find new ways to approach short fiction writing.

Thursdays 7.30pm – 9.30pm (NZST/NZDT)
4 September – 6 November 2025

Online

$720 or $90 per week for 8 weeks

$612 or $76.50 per week (alumni) for 8 weeks

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For both emerging and experienced short story writers, this course is based in the idea that writing is best done within community. You will use your relationships with each other and with the works of accomplished writers to energise your writing and disrupt the stock-standard writing process. You will learn and share skills and techniques to elevate and complicate your story, with the aim to complete a draft of a short story within the course before entering into a workshop process.

In this relational and conversational learning environment, all participants – including tutor Emma Hislop – will engage in dialogue with each other to learn how to identify and fix problems in their writing. You will learn from each other’s stories, noting the use of language, diction, plot, characters, style and structure. Workshops and writing exercises will be designed for you to bring out your own voice and free yourself from the binds of tyrannical power structures.

This course is designed for literary short fiction writers who want to learn how to write from a place of connection to themselves and to others and to learn in a collaborative, reciprocal environment. This is not about writing the ‘perfect’ story, but learning new ways to generate ideas and write inventive and moving stories that challenge the status quo.

Your course includes:

8 weeks of 2-hour evening tutorials;
A complimentary copy of a recent A&U publication;
Peer and tutor feedback on a short story of 2000 – 3000 words;
On completion of the course, alumni discounts on future Faber Writing Academy courses and books from the Allen & Unwin website.

Please note this course will be delivered online and students from both Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia are welcome to register. The first four classes will be held in New Zealand Standard Time, and the last four classes will be held in New Zealand Daylight Savings Time.

Writers you'll be working with:

Emma Hislop

Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) is a writer from New Zealand. Her first book of short fiction, Ruin and Other Stories, was published in March 2023 with Te Herenga Waka University Press. She has an MA with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters. In 2023 she was awarded the Michael King International Residency at Varuna…

Course outline

Session 1: Thursday 4 September
Establishing relationships + introduction to short stories + generating ideas + exploring plot.
In this generative workshop, we will begin by considering texts that function as a series of floating scenes. We will explore the power of words and ideas, fragmentation, and liminal space. What happens in the space between truth and fiction when we use our imagination? We will work on our own short stories in response to prompts, building towards a first draft from a series of short, intense moments.

Session 2: Thursday 11 September
Foundations for your characters + motifs + solving problems in the text
We will be reading and discussing published stories, and then using them as blueprints to examine our own work by way of writing exercises. These are stories and exercises that I turn to repeatedly when revising my own work, and each has been selected for how it treats a specific element of fiction: characterization, plot, point of view, etc.

Session 3: Thursday 18 September
Disrupting the process or Complicating the story
This is a session designed to ask ourselves, what if? Hopefully it will encourage us to take a risk and experiment with adding a complicated element to your story. We might be surprised at what emerges. Let’s think about trying to disrupt our writing processes, getting out of our own way, and approaching each new piece of work in a new way.

Session 4: Thursday 25 September
Reverse-engineering your endings + polishing + submitting
What is reverse engineering and how can it be useful? What can we achieve when we allow ourselves to strip away the padding and the frills? The desirable end game of these seminars is for us to leave with some ideas and tools for how to move our stories into their next drafts.

Two week break to work on draft story.

Please be aware that the following four classes will be held in New Zealand Daylight Savings Time

Session 5: Thursday 16 October
Generative revision
This workshop will introduce us to the concept of “generative revision”, which focuses on producing new material in order to inform and shape the old. Instead of circling the same problems in our stories, we will leave them behind entirely and challenge what we’ve taken for granted about the original draft. For this component of the course, we will each need a completed (or nearly completed) short story, ideally one we feel stuck on.

Session 6: Thursday 23 October
Seeing and re-seeing our work and our selves
Whole class workshop
As Matthew Salesses writes, ‘Workshop should be a place that helps a writer see and re-see for herself.’
For the next three sessions, we will attempt to rethink and remake workshop, using Salesses ‘Craft in the Real World’ as inspiration. We will revise and workshop our own writing on levels ranging from individual word choice to sentence level to the overall structure of the work. By the end of the workshop, we will each have close-reading techniques to use on future drafts and will learn to approach revisions more radically.

Session 7: Thursday 30 October
Whole class workshop

Session 8: Thursday 6 November
Whole class workshop

Praise for this course

“This course was absolutely excellent. The writers we heard from, chosen by Emma, were first class. Emma had a very productive way of getting the group to share and comment on each other’s work. I always left class inspired to write in a way I hadn’t before. Recommend this course and Emma to anyone and everyone!”

How to Apply

This course has one scholarship place available for a writer who would otherwise not be able to afford to attend. Applications from people who identify as diverse (eg. Indigenous, minority ethnic background, LGBTIQA, living with disability) are especially welcome.

To apply, please submit a link to a published story, along with a cover letter outlining why you are interested in the course, and how you would benefit from the scholarship. Please address applications to Pip Smith at faberwritingacademy@allenandunwin.com, with the subject line ‘Scholarship Application: Writing and Disrupting Short Fiction’.

Applications for this scholarship will close on Thursday 14 August 2025.

Payments

Please note that if you select ‘weekly instalments’ these instalments will be billed weekly from the date of the first payment.