Writing Short Stories - Faber Academy

auckland online

auckland online

Writing Short Stories

w/ Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu)

Short story writing requires a sharp skill set. This course will be your opportunity to shape a short story over the space of three weeks with award-winning author Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu), learning the tips and tricks necessary to crafting a captivating work of short fiction.

Wednesdays, 6.30-8.30pm (NZDT), 8 November – 22 November 2023

Online

$AU295 / $AU206.50 (alumni)

This is a past course.

For emerging short story writers, this course will energise you with examples of brilliant contemporary short fiction and fast writing exercises to explore setting, description and tone. You will learn skills and techniques to elevate and complicate your short story draft, heading towards completing at least one single short story during the course.

Discuss your work with other writers and learn to identify and fix problems in your fiction. Understand how to look at pace and dialogue anew to tell your short story. Learn from those moments in others’ short stories that reveal layers to characters’ motivations.

This course is designed for literary short fiction writers who want to learn new ways to generate ideas, explore strategies to devise plot and character, and write inventive and moving stories.

Writing Short Stories also includes a copy-edit on a short story of up to 3000 words by our Editor-in-Residence following the conclusion of the course. This is the perfect opportunity to polish a story to the highest level before submitting for publication at a literary journal or short story competition.

Your course includes:

3 weeks of 2 hour evening tutorials
A complimentary copy of a recent A&U publication
A copy-edit on a short story of up to 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 all times refer to New Zealand Daylights Savings. Students from both New Zealand and Australia are welcome to enrol.

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: Wednesday 8 November
Introduction to short stories + generating ideas + exploring plot.

In this generative workshop, students will begin by considering texts that function as a series of floating scenes. We will explore the power of words and ideas, of fragmentation, and liminal space. What happens in the space between truth and fiction when we use our imagination? Students will work on their own short story in response to prompts from Emma, building towards a first draft from a series of short, intense moments.

Session 2: Wednesday 15 November
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 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: Wednesday 22 November
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 endgame of these seminars is you leave with some ideas and tools for how to move your story into its next draft. There will be a substantial writing component to each session.

Participants will be sent a packet of things to read before we meet each time.

How to Book

This is a past course.