Profluence: flow, the tendency to move forward, a steady progression (from John Gardner‟s The Art of Fiction). Any story, to be satisfying, must be profluent. Plot and Story Structure:

The difference between story and plot: Paraphrasing E. M. Forster, Janet Burroway distinguishes these two terms this way: a story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic and emotional significance. We will be returning to this idea a lot. Authority: Flannery O‟Connor in Mysteries and Manners: “Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things. However, to say that fictions proceeds by the use of detail does not mean the simple, mechanical piling-up of detail. Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you. Art is selective. What is there is essential and creates movement.” Selecting the right details, knowing what to include and what to exclude, and creating movement from that selectivity helped to show the reader that you as a writer are in charge, an “authority” in the way you present the story. Objective Correlative: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an „objective correlative‟: in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” T. S. Eliot. “Looking” and “Creating Meaning”: Almost all of the in-class writing assignments will be about getting you to “look” at the world in order to find “meaning” in it. Helping you to create a “habit of art.” Here‟s another Flannery O-Connor quote: “It is a fact that fiction writing is something in which the whole personality takes part – the conscious as well as the unconscious mind. Art is the habit of the artist; ad habits have to be rotted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a long period of time, by experience; and teaching any kind of writing is largely a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art. I think this is more than just a discipline, although it is that; I think it is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things.”