Class Description
Today, the old police tape barrier between literary and crime writing no longer holds. Alice Munro, William Trevor, and Louise Erdrich have used crime as the spine of acclaimed stories and novels. Michael Chabon, Richard Price, and Thomas Pynchon have made the police procedural and hardboiled detective forms their own. In their bestselling books, Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins have revived twisty domestic suspense, while Ian Rankin and Louise Penny explore psychological complexity and corruption on both sides of the law. And noir anthologies feature writers of all backgrounds telling dark tales of contemporary life. This new crime wave marks the resurgence of an essential truth: storytelling has always looked at crime, as far back as the Bible and Oedipus Rex, and the tension and drive of transgression can power narratives from flash to full-length books.
This one-day workshop will combine lecture, examples, and a series of developmental exercises aimed at getting you started on at least one story. We’ll look at the techniques of mystery and suspense, including the relationship of tension and point of view, the construction of secrets, and the placement of clues and surprises. We’ll look at how how building the “scene of the crime” lets you construct the reader’s journey across boundaries of class, race, gender, occupation, and other divisions. We’ll see how the “rules” of a genre are established and change, ways writers put new spins on tradition, and the relationship between justice and resolution. You’ll also receive information about markets, particularly the range of current magazines interested in work from literary to neo-pulp. Note: while examples will center on fiction, this workshop and the exercises are also applicable to nonfiction, and methods of research will be touched on.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.