Fiction

We’re all familiar with satisfying story shape, the arc of a story that follows the pattern of jokes and sex—the inciting incident, rising action, crisis and the falling action. Yet sometimes this pattern can leave a story flat, without room for wonder. If a story leads exactly where you would expect it to go, then both the writer and the reader have discovered nothing. How do we expand our well-behaved, satisfying stories to fully burst into the mystery and unpredictability of human experience? In this workshop we will look at a few endings to short stories by Anton Chekov, Alice Munro, James Joyce, Charles Baxter, Tessa Hadley, ZZ Packer, Carmen Maria Machado, and others, for ways they use time, imagery, dialog, and omission to open…