Making a Scene [Rebecca Makkai]

All Levels | Scenes are the building blocks of fiction—and yet while an education in playwriting pays tremendous attention to the architecture of scene, fiction workshops tend to overlook it. We’ll take a playwright’s approach to fiction by learning how to build scenes with a solid arc, scenes that advance every element of the story. On Saturday, we’ll talk architecture, momentum, and shape. We’ll also discuss all the things that aren’t scene, including exposition, summary, and atemporal narration. On Sunday, we’ll dissect some published scenes (and look at some that break all the rules). We’ll also spend time rethinking our own scene structures. Appropriate for writers working on short stories, novels, and scene-driven creative nonfiction.

This class has a one-hour lunch break.