Tuesday, October 22nd, 7-9pm EST
online, $75, 15 students max
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Moving directly from point A to point B isn’t always the best way to tell a story. Sometimes we find ourselves beginning at the end, hopping back and forth in time, or circling around the same events until our understanding of them changes. Non-linear narratives can make for fascinating and thrilling reading, but writing them poses particular challenges. How do we maintain continuity, clarity, and suspense when our stories don't follow a straight line? How do we decide which episodes of a timeline we want to visit? How do we make forays into the past illuminate, rather than bog down, the present? How do we keep the reader oriented in where and when they are in the story?
Looking at works as disparate as Homer’s The Odyssey, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and more, we will discuss how authors time-hop successfully and why a non-linear structure serves the stories they tell. We will also dive into how we, as writers, can craft our own “disorderly” narratives. Expect to come away with ideas and to do writing exercises that will help you find the right “shape” for your plot, build suspense when the reader already knows how your story ends, and keep the reader oriented in a narrative that doesn’t follow a straight line.
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About the instructor
Alanna Schubach is the author of The Nobodies (Blackstone, 2022). Her short fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, and more. She lives in New York, where she works as a freelance journalist and writing teacher.
Testimonials
"Alanna creates such a warm, supportive classroom that you feel comfortable putting your work out there for your classmates, which prepares you for putting it out there for publication. She is an excellent editor and I learned so much from her input that made my writing so much stronger. She clearly loves her job and her students and that makes all the difference. She also makes the experience fun, which is crucial! She is a gifted teacher." --Judith Osofsky
“‘Tremendously insightful’ is what comes to mind when I think about Alanna. She readily identified plot holes, inconsistencies, and pacing issues in my manuscript and offered recommendations that were right on the mark. Prior to working with her, I was so unhappy with my novel that I was considering scrapping it altogether. There were too many flaws, too many loose ends. I didn't know where to start. Page by page, she helped me fall in love with the story again and, tie those loose ends into neat little bows. Thank you so much, Alanna!” —Alexandra Alhadeff