Hosted by Writing Workshops. Led by Elwin Cotman, author of the upcoming collection Weird Black Girls (2024, Scribner), and the novel The Age of Ignorance (Scribner, 2025).

Get to know Elwin in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

Writing the Sublime explores how to craft sublime moments in speculative fiction. Students will do this through readings and focused instruction around the sublime.

Majesty. Awe. Romance. The sense of wonder.

Myths and legends have long been one of humanity’s tools in exploring big questions and grand emotions, specifically through crafting stories and imagery that match the grandiosity of these feelings. One tool that speculative writers use is the sublime, also called the "sense of wonder," the evocation of something greater than human experience to evoke feelings of awe and terror.

In this online class, we'll be exploring the sublime as a key element in speculative fiction. Encounters with things beyond human understanding have a double purpose, on the page and real life: they push characters towards change, but also create euphoria in the reader. We will look over the common mythologies that unite humanity, and discuss how we can remix them in ways that elevate their symbolic meaning. We will also examine how authors create the sublime through narrative beats that build to a satisfying conclusion. Besides reading and analyzing speculative texts, we will do exercises focused around the sublime, and discuss each other's pieces.

This class is open to writers of all levels. Writers will leave this class with a deeper understanding of how to integrate the sublime into their writing, as well as written and verbal feedback and revision ideas on two submissions.

In the course of the class, students will:

• Engage in the sublime both theoretically and through craft

• Build a body of work through exercises

• Discuss creative work in a group setting

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

In this class, students will come to understand the sublime, from a craft perspective, as a disrupting force that creates change in their characters. As such, that disruptive element is worked into the curriculum: there will be homework assignments where, instead of writing, students will produce another type of art relevant to their writing, or engage in some way with the outside world. Through prompts and exercises, students will learn how to reimagine mythology in creating the sublime. They will gain an understanding of the role story craft plays in creating sublime moments. As well, they will learn how to evoke sublimity in more specific craft devices such as language.