Form & Content: Experimenting with Prose Structures with Ploi Pirapokin

In this 90-minute course, we’ll borrow inspirations from poetic forms, genre conventions such as time limited devices, and learn six common traditional and unconventional story structures by weighing the risks and rewards of each form.

Does a successful story have to consist of a beginning, middle, and end in that order? The Hero’s Journey? Move in linear, consecutive time? In this 2-hour course, we’ll borrow inspirations from poetic forms, genre conventions such as time limited devices, and learn six common traditional and unconventional story structures by weighing the risks and rewards of each form. This is a craft discussion that includes theories and examples of form and content from Jerome Stern, Jane Alison, and Samuel R. Delaney, as well as contemporary authors like Senna Ahmad, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, and Fernanda Melchor, and more.

Story structures and perceived constraints can be generative. Come with one sentence and leave with possibilities to write that same sentence as a story in three different forms. We’ll learn the right questions to ask of our stories on whether the shapes they’ve appeared as will be the shape they remain, and experiment with fragments, Hermit Crab essays, and braiding to achieve the resonance we desire.

Ploi Pirapokin's work is featured in Tor.com, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Art and Craft of Stories from Asia: A Writer's Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic, and more. She has received grants and fellowships from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Creative Capacity Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, Kundiman and others. A graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she currently teaches at the Writers Program at UCLA Extension, WritingWorkshops.com, and the University of Hong Kong. She sits on the board for Khōréō magazine, Hivemind: Global Speculative Fiction Magazine, Kearny Street Workshop, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and the Ragdale Foundation.