Free workshop sponsored by Storyknife Writers Retreat.
An Arc by Any Other Name: U.S. fiction and nonfiction writers have been trained to follow “universal” rules of story structure: The Aristotelian plot arc. Three-Act Structure. The Hero’s Journey. In recent years, diverse voices in prose writing and craft have called for expanding these norms. “it’s about time that individual agency stops dominating how we think about plot or even causality. If we canonize E. M. Forster and Aristotle, it should be as representatives of one tradition among many,” Matthew Salesses writes in Craft in the Real World. In this workshop for prose writers of all levels, we deconstruct both western and non-western story structures and storytelling conventions to better understand how our own work might draw from, and fit into, a literal world of stories. We’ll read stories and watch short films as examples, and experiment with both generative writing and restructuring.

Angie Chuang is an associate professor of journalism at University of Colorado Boulder who writes and teaches a wide range of nonfiction forms.