So for the last three years, I’ve led a short-story group that I call Eight-Week Fiction, in which local friends go from blank page to admirable short story in eight weeks. But a number of participants have larger projects in mind, so I’ve just started a new group that I’m calling the Spruce Knob Narrative Society, after the name of the gravel road I live on. From August 1 2023 through May 31 2024, a dozen of us will create full book-length works of other-focused narrative craft: fiction, memoir, or biography. (Yes, memoir is other-focused, because it’s about someone you aren’t any more.)
I’ll be doing a lot of coaching of the group, hosting twice-a-month sessions, reading bunches of drafts and scraps. But I’d like to offer some of that to you as well.
Back in the days of lunatic optimism over online education, MIT announced that it would put its entire catalog of courses online, free for anyone to take as they liked. MIT OpenCourseWare, it was called, but it launched a utopian model commonly known as MOOCs, or Massively Open Online Courses. Thousands, or tens of thousands, of people could take a course—listen to lectures, read texts, do problem sets. What they DIDN’T get, of course, was feedback.
The MasterClass commercial course subscriptions are much the same. You can watch David Mamet give twenty short lectures about playwriting, or Joan Benoit Samuelson do eleven sessions on distance running. You watch them at your own time and your own pace, You won’t get to talk with your instructor, won’t get direct feedback, but you might learn some things or pick up some inspiration nonetheless.
So what I’m going to do here in this space is put up all of the materials I’m sharing with the Spruce Knob Narrative Society, and you can have them all for free. I can’t do coaching with all of you, but you might learn some things or pick up some inspiration nonetheless.
They’ll come up one at a time, because I’m building the sessions based on local need. So there’s no curriculum I’ll walk you through, just the things that I’m seeing that are relevant at any particular moment. Sounds like a blog, doesn’t it?
So for the next ten months, expect this space to be focused a little more than normal on the techniques and the practices of fiction. Happy to have you with us.
Herb Childress 