Each session of this course includes a written lecture, a writing assignment to turn in for instructor feedback, and creative exercises to further your learning.
Session 1: Writing the Beginning
Session 2: Pacing the Middle of Your Story
Session 3: How to End
Session 4: Revision
What will you learn?
Who should attend?
Student Testimonials
Meet the instructors
Ran Walker
Ran Walker (he/him)Â is the author of over 30 books. His short stories, flash fiction, microfiction, and poetry have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals. Prior to becoming a writer and educator, he worked in magazine publishing and practiced law in Mississippi.
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He is the winner of the Indie Author Project's National Indie Author of the Year Award, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Best Fiction Ebook Award, the Virginia Indie Author Project Award for Adult Fiction, and the Blind Corner Afrofuturism Microfiction Contest. His collection Keep It 100: 100-Word Stories was selected by Kojo Baffoe for South Africa's Sunday Times' Best Reads of 2021.Â
Ran is also the recipient of both a Mississippi Arts Commission/NEA artist grant and an artist mini-grant.  He has served as an Artist-in-Residence with the Mississippi Arts Commission. Additionally, he is a past participant in the Hurston-Wright Writers Week Workshop and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Callaloo Writers Workshop. He has been featured in Library Journal and Publishers Weekly and at the Library Journal Day of Dialog. He has served as a judge for several regional, national, and international contests, and he also regularly writes for Writer's Digest magazine, where he serves as a Contributing Editor.
Ran is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Hampton University and teaches with Writer's Digest University. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
John DeChancie
John DeChancie is the author of two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. His novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres have been attracting a wide readership for more than fifteen years, and over a million copies of his books have seen print, many in foreign languages. His humorous fantasy series, beginning with Castle Perilous, became a best seller for Berkley/Ace. Booklist described John’s novel MagicNet (William Morrow) as “a welcome sigh of comic relief…shamelessly droll, literate, and thoroughly entertaining. Magicnet is the fantasy genre’s whimsical answer to Neuromancer.” John’s other science fiction novels include From Prussia With Love (Prima Publishing), Masterminds of Falkenstein (Prima Publishing) and Innerverse (Avon), as well as his anthology of original fantasy short stories co-edited with Martin Greenberg—Castle Fantastic (DAW Books)
In addition to science fiction and fantasy, John also writes horror and nonfiction; his articles “A Fresh Look at This Island Earth” and “A Tribute to Rocketship X-M” can be found in Cult Movies). His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in numerous original anthologies, including Spell Fantastic (edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, DAW Books) and, most recently I, Alien edited by Mike Resnick (DAW Books), which contains John’s short story “The Loaves and the Fishes.”
His book Other States of Being: Sixteen Short Abductions, is a collection of stories, reprinted from various magazines and original paperback anthologies, that all explore the theme of the alien (offered as a print-on-demand title by Pulpless.com, Inc.). His latest book is a small press short story collection A Little Gray Book of Alien Stories published by Borderlands Press, Maryland.
John’s novel Witchblade: Talons was republished by iBooks (Simon and Shuster), and the entire Castle Perilous series and the Starrigger trilogy were recently published in translation in Russia.
