The Art of Storytelling is a class about how to use storytelling techniques to captivate your readers.

Since the principles storytelling are universal, we’ll explore the work of brilliant storytellers in a variety of genres—from writers like Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, and Tina Fey to stand-up comics like Louis CK and Mike Birbiglia.

We’ll watch scenes from movies (The Bourne Identity, Up, Casablanca) and TV (Louie, Breaking Bad, True Detective), and we’ll read pages from graphic novels like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.

We’ll listen to stories from The Moth and This American Life and read from the journal Spike Lee kept while he was writing Do The Right Thing. And yes, we will talk about Hamilton.

Through all of this, we’ll break down the principles of good storytelling—vulnerability, suspense, goal/obstacle, action/reaction, cause and effect—and you’ll learn how to apply those same techniques in your own writing, whether you want to write fiction or nonfiction, stories or essays, a Moth story or a TED talk.

Thursday evenings 7:00pm – 9:00pm
for 6 weeks from May 18 – June 22