Plot: It’s Not a Four-Letter Word [Michael Shilling]

As fiction writers, we love the symmetry of a great sentence, the power of place and setting, the complexities of the mind and heart merging to contemplate experience. We also love plot. Really we do. It’s just hard to come up with ones that don’t feel dictated, contrived, stock. We’ll examine how to build and revise plots that grow organically out of a character’s choices, context, and desires. This is a workshop, and everyone will have their prose reviewed. We will also read and discuss stories by plot masters, such as Robert Stone, Flannery O’Connor, and Angela Carter.