Creative Writing MG YA : April 2017

Course Description

Middle Grade & Young Adult Fiction. AKA "Wonder 101." Every story needs it. Especially stories for younger audiences. But to write it, you have to feel it, right? That's the informal goal of the class. To teach craft, yes, but, also, to instill wonder in you and your work. We write, of course, but we eat, too, and listen to music. We dance. We go on field trips. I bring in agents and authors, sure, but also armored Renn Faire fighters and what can only be called "circus folk." We discuss poetic faith and world building and sensory detail. But also the brutal science of medieval man-to-man combat. How to quench and temper steel. My guests talk about creating character through interiority. But they also pound nails up their nose and square off with bastard swords in the parking lot behind Murray Hall. Lev Grossman (The Magicians), who has visited the class over two dozen times, likes to talk about Narnia and making magic from everyday impressions, but, if pushed, he'll demonstrate an ox stance with a black polypropylene blade. It’s a course in terror, too, and vulnerability. In nighttime logic and fairytale rationale. In composing work to be read by stolen candle ends in a rambling old Elizabethan house flooded with darkness, while the grandfather clock ticks in the hall below and the sea crashes on the distant coast.Some creative writing instructors erect bans. No fantasy or sci-fi, they say. Send them my way, I say. So, come on, grab your friends. We'll go to very distant lands.

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