Beginnings and the Narrative Arc: Crafting Openings that Provide Map and Meaning

Beginnings and the Narrative Arc: Crafting Openings that Provide Map and Meaning

with Lucian Childs

Details:
Saturday, October 14, 2023
11:00am-1:00pm; 2:00pm-4:00pm
Z.J. Loussac Library, Anchorage
Class Description:
Whether your genre is memoir, creative nonfiction or fiction, writing a great beginning is one of the writer’s most difficult tasks. The opening must immediately engage the reader, while speaking to the central questions: What is the piece about and what is at stake? No matter how skilled you are, until you answer these, you lose your way. You burn through draft after draft, hoping to stumble on a strategy that unifies the morass of detail you’ve created. A well-crafted beginning can serve as a narrative roadmap, providing the elements you need to navigate your story to its deepest intent.
After a quick overview of story structure, we’ll investigate how the narrative arc reveals itself in the beginnings of micro-fictions by Steve Almond, Andrew Porter and Kathy Fish. Through writing exercises, we’ll create our own beginnings—ones we’ll mine for narrative potential to point us to work that is purposeful and coherent. By the end of the workshop, participants will have generated material they can develop into longer works.
This class is designed for writers of all levels of experience and skill.

Pricing and Registration: 
This event is open to members and non-members. 
-Member Price: $100/person
-Non-member Price: $120/person

Scholarships
49 Writers is offering one full scholarship for this class to an individual who can demonstrate financial need. To apply, click here.

Instructor:
Lucian Childs is a fiction writer whose debut work, Dreaming Home (2023), was published to critical acclaim by Biblioasis. He was a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Grant awardee, a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and an artist-in-residence at Byrdcliffe Art Colony and Artscape Gibraltar Point. He was a contributing editor of Lambda Literary finalist, Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry. His stories and reviews have appeared in the literary journals Grain, The Puritan, Cirque and Prairie Fire, among others. A twenty-five-year resident of Anchorage, he now lives in Toronto, Ontario. For more information, please visit www.lucianchilds.com.