Novel Middles
Instructor: Stacia Ann (Stacia Ann)Includes a free two month upgraded membership! Details
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Duration: Four Weeks
Class Size: 7 Students
Seats Left: 3
Week 1: Where to go from here? Revisiting your story outline and beginning. Plan the middle.
Reading: Revisit "Great Gatsby" outline. Identify the major complications of the beginning and middle. Read also chapter 4 of "Great Gatsby." Identify the call to action, the protagonist's full commitment to the story's journey, and backstory introduced. Also note issues of narrative "voice," symbols, and minor supporting characters.
Writing: Identify several complications for your middle chapters and a possible mini-climax. Consider how these complications relate to the plot as a whole. Consider introducing backstory and symbols as appropriate. Write a scene/chapter (Note the amount of writing is approximate depending on the novel.)
Week 2: The Mini-Climax
Reading: Read chapter 5 in "The Great Gatsby." Study how the scenes rise in tension and build on each other logically toward a mini-climatic moment on the way toward the main climax.
Writing: write your next pages. Include one or two scenes that show complications that heighten tension. Provide backstory, symbols, heighten narrative voice.
Week 3: Heightening the tension. Tension should build steadily to the climax.
Reading: Chapter 6 of Gatsby. Note how the complications grow increasingly more serious and build in backstory at the same time, so that the story is going backward and forward in time simultaneously.
Writing: Next pages. Show the increasingly dire circumstances of your protagonist.
Week 4: Crisis. All the complications lead inevitably to the climax.
Reading: Study chapter 7 of "The Great Gatsby." Identify the climax and what leads to it.
Writing: Next pages. Build the complications to the climax.
Instructor: Stacia Ann
About The Instructor:
Stacia Ann is an Linguistics Lecturer and Writing Instructor at the University of California. She has a doctorate of Education, Master's of Art in English/TESOL. This instructor has taught writing classes for over ten years. She also teaches academic writing and English as a Second Language at the University of the Pacific. A published author including works of short fiction and academic nonfiction including contest winning stories.