The Short Story Toolkit with Rebecca Makkai

Writer and StoryStudio Artistic Director Rebecca Makkai presents four online lectures on the craft of the short story, with discussions of drafting, revision, and publication.

The first stories you ever heard were short stories (fairy tales, family lore, picture books), and it’s no wonder that this form has endured for all of recorded human history. Today, the short story is a vibrant and essential genre that contains some of the freshest experiments in fiction as well as some of the classic comforts of the form.

In four online sessions, we’ll break down the art of writing short and sweet, and challenge our own writing practices with craft talks, readings, and exercises.

The pacing, arc, characterization, orientation and endings of a short story are often quite different from those of a novel, and we’ll explore the tactics unique to writing the short form. We’ll read and discuss four published short stories (one each week), discussing how they’re constructed and what makes them work. And we’ll talk about the writing process, from drafting to revision, as well as the short story marketplace: submitting and selling individual stories, and constructing a story collection. Optional weekly writing prompts will give you inspiration to start and complete one short story over the course of the class. 

This class is open enrollment, and we hope you’ll be part of a large group of enthusiastic learners. You will not be workshopping each other or submitting writing, but you will receive one published story to read ahead of each class, as well as many handouts and optional exercises; and you’ll be able to ask questions of the instructor. Lectures will be presented live; they will also be recorded so you can catch up on a class you missed or review the material again.

Our four sessions will be:

Planning and pacing the short story

Finding meaning in a small space

Rebelling against form

Revision and publication

Rebecca Makkai is the author of this year’s New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions For You as well as the novelsThe Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, UNR Tahoe, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.