Craft Seminar: The Fulcrum Method: How to Plot a Short Story with Jess Row
Craft Seminar: The Fulcrum Method: How to Plot a Short Story with Jess Row
2 Sessions: Wednesdays, June 11 + 18
7:00-9:00pm ET
Jess Row
Jess Row is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer who's published three collections of short stories: The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and Storyknife (forthcoming from Ecco in 2026). His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, n+1, Conjunctions, Tin House, and three times in the Best American Short Stories. His other books include the novels Your Face in Mine and The New Earth, and the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.
How do you fit a complete story, a human drama, a beginning-middle-and-end, into a text that might be 2000 or 5000 words long? What makes a great short story feel so much longer, fuller, and richer than its length would imply? In this class I'll introduce a simple technique I've been teaching students for 25 years: a way to find the right point of entry into your story and exit out of it. I think it's the key to understanding how stories create meaningful drama in tiny spaces, or as Grace Paley put it, "enormous changes at the last minute."
In the first class we'll start off by reading some very short stories (no advance reading necessary) and talk about the principle of fulcrum and how to find it. Then we'll do some preliminary exercises and I'll give you a homework assignment. In the second class we'll listen to one another's stories and I'll give tips on how to build your story-writing skills with more reading and writing.
Workshop Highlights:
For beginners: this is your introduction to the technique that makes a short story happen.
For practicing writers: the fulcrum is a skill you can adapt to any kind of short story, conventional, genre, or wildly avant-garde.
For anyone who loves short stories: appreciating the fulcrum will give you new insight into how great story writers do what they do.
This class has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Wednesday, June 4.
Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth (Ecco Press, 2023) and Your Face in Mine (Riverhead, 2015), a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (Graywolf, 2019), and two collections of short stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (Five Chapters Books, 2011) and The Train to Lo Wu (The Dial Press, 2005). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues.
