THE HARRIETTE AUSTIN WRITERS are pleased to announce ELEMENTS OF FICTION, a series of online creative writing workshops. Developed by established writers, writing instructors, and instructional designers, the series is taught by experienced writing instructors, published authors and professionals in related areas, with guest appearances by writers, agents, editors, publicists, and other members of the publishing world.  It’s a writing conference, short course and critique group in one.

Each of the 11-week workshops is composed of a class “lecture,” assigned readings, external activities, student writing exercises, writing evaluations, a student/instructor feedback forum, and a question and answer section. As part of the effort to make the workshops more meaningful, students are required to work on a personal writing project. Successful completion of the entire course sequence will entitle the graduate to a Certificate in Creative Writing from the Harriette Austin Writing Program.

Our Assumption

These workshops are presented with the assumption that you come to them with motivation and desire — perhaps a burning, all-consuming desire — to become a writer, or a better writer. We proceed from the premise based upon experience that there is no one-best way to write. What works wonderfully well for one writer may work not at all well for another. There are as many approaches to writing as there are writers. Because of this, you will not find here an imposed discipline or hard and fast rules that are required in order to make you a successful writer.

Our Commitment

What we will do is present, illustrate, practice and discuss various approaches that have worked for others, giving you opportunity to try on the fit of different methods for yourself, with the expectation that you will find among them inspiration that will motivate and guide you in adopting or inventing methods that work well for you. We will examine the nature of creativity, where it comes from, how to nurture it, and how to use it and keep it in your writing. We will talk about the nature and requirements of narrative writing and the parts of a fiction novel. We will work on characters, plotting, pacing, dialogue, setting, theme, and much more. 

Through all of this we will help you develop and work with characters, scenes and passages from your own writing. When we approach the final workshops, we will work with you in developing the summary, query letters and synopsis that you will need in getting your completed manuscript into the hands of an agent or editor. 

Our Approach

In these opening paragraphs you may have noticed the use of the word work several times. Writing is work for most writers, but it need not and should not be drudgery or work endured through pain. The work of writing should be work of joy and a labor of expression and fulfillment. Our aim in these workshops is to provide guidance, direction and support for you to achieve your writing goals, and do it with the greatest pleasure and success.

This writing program is built upon the philosophy and techniques used by Harriette Austin in her more than thirty years of teaching Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and other institutions of higher learning. Students guided by her methods have gone on to become successful writers whose books and articles have sold millions of copies. You can find out more about Harriette at http://webhawc.home.att.net/Harriette.htm. 

The Conference Connection

The University of Georgia each year hosts the annual Harriette Austin Writers Conference begun in 1994 by her students and named in her honor. The conference is now among the most successful and highly regarded in the nation. As an added bonus to your workshops we will have drop-in visits from some of the more outstanding writers, agents, editors, publicists, and other experts from the publishing business who have served as faculty at the Harriette Austin Writers Conferences. These distinguished publishing professionals will give presentations and share with you their points of view on issues they think are important for writers. You are invited to visit the conference web site at http://www.coe.uga.edu/hawc/ to learn more about the upcoming Harriette Austin Writers Conference and about conferences from years past. 

Where Are We Going?

All the instruction in this series of workshops, the examples, the exercises, and the projects have been designed to take you on a journey (a very pleasant journey, we hope) along a fruitful path from which we will arrive in another world. Our destination will be the world of fiction. We've all been there at one time or another, seen glimpses of it, received postcards from there, watched movies of it, maybe spent a night, a long weekend or several days there. But the journey we're talking about now is different. We're not going to be tourists. We're looking to stake out a claim and perhaps move there for good.

If we're going to pack up the kids and the family pet and send them off to Aunt Martha's while we head off in our own direction and spend six weeks or so together on the road to Shangri-La, it's probably a good idea to have a clear picture of where we're going, how we're going to get there, and what life will be like as a writer of fiction. And that's where we will begin . . . at the beginning.