230186 Creative Writing: Character Arc, Story Arc (S) (SoSe 2026)

This creative writing class is going to focus on character and narrative. According to Aristotle, character and plot are the two constituent elements of drama, and character is revealed through action (not, he might have added, through the narrator's info dump...). Story-writing guides distinguish between "showing" and "telling", and between character-driven stories (e.g. Macbeth; The Catcher in the Rye) and plot-driven stories (basically all popular fiction). In fact, most narratives are mixtures between the two, and no narrative will succeed that has either boring characters or no engaging plot.
If you are working on a short story or novel of your own, you can decide to work on it in this class -- provided you are willing to share passages from it. If you have never written anything fictional, you are equally welcome -- provided you are willing to spend the semester developing and writing your own short story or novella and share it with the class.
This class will not offer a wide range of creative-writing exercises or explore a wide spectrum of genres. The focus lies on one or two narrative projects that you work on continuously, alone or with a writing buddy, and that you "test" against writing techniques and literary features to do with narrative prose.
We will look at a variety of short stories and excerpts from novels to see what established literary writers have produced. Remember, too, that if you decide to write a module paper, it will have to include an analysis and critique of your own writing.