I was asked for advice about teaching fiction in a 12-week term. Over the years, I’ve been asked to design curriculum many times, usually by administrators who have never actually done that and don’t appreciate (or care?) the amount of work involved. I have never been paid and rarely even receive a thank-you for doing this. The work is consuming and exhausting, and I should have learned by now to say no, but I always do it. It’s interesting to me.

Though I was discouraged from teaching fiction, I assigned fiction every term I taught. Telling stories is what makes us human.

You might teach people how to write fiction this way:

Consider at the outset, how much homework, how much work you are willing to read as a teacher. Draft at least some of the writing in a writing fiction class by hand on paper. There is a difference once you type into a computer. Refuse to accept work that has been drafted using AI*. Watch students begin. Require all drafts be turned in. Do many very short low-stakes fragments and scenes. Explore craft, particularly considering sentence structure and tone, dialogue and scene, the magic that happens. Use the shorter assignments and reading to get to this. Advise students to watch for the assignment that gets away from them.

I have taught a workshop for teachers called “How to Teach Writing Without Making Your Eyes Bleed.” The title comes from an excellent AP teacher whose eyes literally bled every spring before her students took the AP test. Since I was teaching as many as 200 students at a time as a high school teacher (never that many teaching college classes), I have strategies. Among those: Grade writing only after it has been through revision. Grade only after work has been typed.

Outline everything they will have done by the end of term and share this with your students. Reassure them that your goal is not to turn them all into published writers (you won’t). Your goal is to help them to become better at story-telling and to understand what makes a story work for readers. Publication is another thing altogether. Most MFA graduates have learned nothing about publication.

Begin with an assigned short fiction. A 300-500-word fable works well because it fits single-spaced on a page and has very specific conventions, which relieves students from having to invent the wheel, so to speak. State the moral at the end. [It’s important to note that I read hundreds of their fables and they were always good.] I required MLA form for this assignment. I usually threw my students a twist or two for the second draft: add dialogue or change the point of view to first person. Usually both. I marked the stories for errors and required them to revise until the story was free of error—with no penalty if they needed another seven drafts to get there. If you keep it single-spaced on one page, it is entirely manageable to staple previous drafts behind. Assume three drafts or ten. This assignment will ensure everyone understands how to set up their pages and gives you a good overview of their skills (or lack thereof). Having them write the first draft in class may make sussing the AI-users easier.*

Throughout the term, have them read many good writers: Assign what you know will demonstrate the techniques you value in fiction. This is a discussion topic for one class period each week: read the assigned text and discuss it in class (a short story in the public domain works—check what they can find online, and if necessary make them read it in class and respond the same day). 

Another series of weekly assignments might be the ones from Ursula K. Le Guin’s craft book, Steering the Craft—you can read each assignment aloud or require students purchase the text, which has a ton of great information! [I have created my own ten assignments geared to nonfiction writing.] I can recommended Stephen King’s craft book, which might be better than his novels. There are others.

Microfictions of 250 words ±25, can be tailored to emphasize specific skills such as POV or lists or conversation or scene. One due each week with a particular craft or scenario for each and including a specific word. For example: Tell a story with two people in a car driving to an event and one of them has a secret they want to tell, include the work “mask.” I had the class choose the “magic words” they must include because it gives them some ownership. They might write one each week for most of the term (10 in a 12-week class) or just eight. Stamp them as “completed on schedule” and then they turn them in all at once for credit, with a lengthened story stapled at the front—the only one graded.

All the above might be 50% of their grade for the term. Include discussions and peer editing of the first writing and of the longer one.

As a last assignment, a longer story of 4000-5000 or 2500-3500, ±2000, or even a flash fiction of ≤1000 words. This final story is the necessary goal, but find a way to be flexible if someone finds they cannot write to your required length. Maybe the story must be longer, or very short? For this assignment, I urge requiring Modern Manuscript Format (Shunn), which is standard for fiction and nonfiction submissions. There are many options concerning how you assign a short story and what you require. Be as flexible as possible. Good stories, in my experience, are born of pure magic. You can’t demand magic and we sometimes throw up out hands concerning how to start. You might suggest:

• Begin with a true story you make more dramatic or set elsewhere; 
• choose familiar traditional story such as a fairytale, rewritten to take place here and now; 
• rewrite a news piece that makes you wonder and then create backstory and afterward;
• examine a problem and solve it in the story;
• expand a micro by complicating it or exploring more of that story;  
• develop an in-class writing based on Chris Van Allsburg’s illustration in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. [find a used copy or individual illustrations online—or have students find any one of them and write a story for which the drawing is an illustration;
• or just allow the short piece that’s getting away from you to grow, the voice that will not stop telling you their story, the question you find demands answering by showing you what happens but insists you get down every darned detail. 

Evaluating a short story in-class might serve as a midterm or final, if you need one. You might offer students the choice of how to prove their skill by giving them a bad story to improve and/or explain why it’s not good and how it could be better. There are plenty of general “rules” about writing short fiction. Alice Munro deliberately and magnificently breaks most of them in her early collection, Friends of My Youth.

Some of the suggested assignment include what we now mostly call speculative or genre fiction. If that’s not your comfort zone, don’t go there. Stick to realist stories. Do what makes sense to you.

About drafts: Teach them drafting/revising to the point where the author is stuck, and to seek peer editing (or workshop), and revision right from the beginning. Most new writers will not have workshopped a story. Teach them to be gentle with one another. Point out that one gift of reading others’ work is recognizing what works and doesn’t and then applying those insights to our own writing. Remind them that creation involves risk, but that what is obvious to one person is invisible to another. Help them see more.

Workshopping: The goal for the reader is to express admiration of what works, ask questions to clarify confusion, and perhaps suggest where they want more or less on the page. It is not the reader’s job to “fix” anything; that is up to the writer. [Even editors who are very good at finding where work is needed are not helpful in telling the writer how to accomplish that work—though they will try—that work must remain in the writer’s hands.] You will have the occasional student who believes their first draft is perfect, every single time. They need to accept that they are wrong about that.

You may quote me: No one writes a perfect first draft. No one gets it right the first time, not even after hours of work on that first draft. We need to put that wonderful “perfect” draft away for a while, and then look at it with our own fresh eyes. There isn’t time in a course to do that properly, but even a day or two of not looking helps. After hard work and many drafts and setting it aside and workshopping (peer editing for adults) and staring at it till our eyes bleed (famous quote), we might get there.

Go online and search “How to workshop fiction?” you’ll find plenty of advice. The standard is everyone reads the text or the author does aloud, and then the author is silent while the group responds. The response is not thumbs up but a careful appreciation and evaluation: what works and what isn’t done. Yet. [That “yet” can hurt. Keep it in mind when offering feedback.]

Teach alternative chronology:

• Teach the traditional plot triangle and why no one writes stories structured like that anymore;
• warn about expository lumps;
• teach the work of a scene, which has a person or people in a particular time doing something, even standing still and tapping their foot’s a reason for a scene—by establishing and revealing character, motivation, information, conflict—establishing, escalating, turning—and in this way moves the story forward;
• likewise, every description contributes to our understanding of the story because how the flowers bloom or fade suggests the overall arc and mood of the fiction;
• start the story with a scene pulled from the middle of action;
• cut the first page (or four) of a story (this is sometimes “throat-clearing”);
• and remind them that hack-and-slash butchery of their own work often makes it stronger because the author always knows more about their story that they put on the page.

One final point: This is a personal bug of mine. Bring bad work to workshop if it’s the best you have, because we all get stuck, can’t see our forest for the trees, need help. But first read the story aloud (if you stumble over a word or phrase try to figure out how to fix that). Then read it to someone or to the dog or the bathroom mirror. Bringing bad work to workshop is forgivable. Most of us write bad stuff before we get to the good. Bringing work that you haven’t already done what you can, at that time, is annoying. If we haven’t already read it aloud, checked for and repaired typos, ensured the story fits the assignment (save it for another time if it doesn’t), we are abusing our readers. Do not abuse your readers. Give them the best you can, even if you know it’s not good. Yet. Listen to what the readers say, find your own solutions. Have patience. Write another fifty drafts.

I was asked to design a 12-week class, and thought it was odd because in college, classes are usually in semesters (15 weeks) or quarters (10 weeks). And then I wrote most of this and set it off. No word from the person who asked. Not the first time I’ve been asked for help and heard nothing back.

*A former student who is a tenured professor tells their students that if it sounds to them as if the work was written by AI, regardless of whether it is or not, they will receive a D for the assignment. We don’t want our fiction manufactured by technology or sounding as if it were.