Revision in Speculative Fiction

About this course:

Revising a short story for publication can feel extremely personal and intuitive—how do I know it's done? While there are plenty of craft tips and tricks with polishing a short story, speculative fiction stories have their own set of genre tropes to contend with. In this course, you’ll learn how to implement already existing tips on style, voice, and structure to your short story to intensify the non-naturalist elements in your pieces for genre magazines and literary journals open to non-naturalist works. We’ll cover how to world build effectively, maintain pacing and tension with patterns of unease and pleasure, address and enhance characters’ relationships and interactions, escalate conflict and drama, streamline specific scenes, elevate the dialogue, and best highlight your themes, all while staying true to the essence of your story as you take it to the next level. With the use of lectures, analyzing drafts of published pieces in both literary and genre magazines, and tips from editors of genre magazines, you get a first-hand experience on the drafting and revision process of a speculative short story and knowledge of when and where to submit.