Writing Co-Lab

The best short stories end with a bang — or a twist, or a moment of ecstasy, poetic connection, or brilliant subversion. If there are as many ways to end a story as there are stories, whatever your project, and whatever mode you write in — whether comic or tragic, ironic or earnest, realist or absurdist — your best ending will be inextricable from the mechanics of your plot. In this class we will look under the hood of a couple of short stories to reverse-engineer their endings through analysis of their pacing, plots, and endings, and spend time workshopping brilliant new endings for our own works-in-progress.