“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s observation serves as the cornerstone for our next inquiry: the narrative "turns" of literary fiction. Moving beyond the distillation of life into convincing moments, Turns of Realism focuses on the structural decisions that guide a protagonist through the surprising, inevitable realization of life’s ever-changing stakes. In this four-week follow-up, we move from the tools of craft to the architecture of the narrative arc, exploring where a character’s initial situation leads—be it toward an extended short story or the foundation of a novel.
Traditional storytelling often emphasizes the "Hero’s Journey" toward conquest; here, we explore a more honest, realist trajectory. This is the journey of The Fracture: the realization that the world is not under our control, the experience of a reality that offers friction and difference, the ultimate path toward accepting how to live within a world that is not ours to own, but ours to embrace.
The Method: Macro-to-Micro Layering
Our process begins with an Architectural Blueprint (The Existentialist’s Beat Sheet). This plots a story not as a moral victory, but as an existential experience, the discovery that to live in a real world is to make raw poetry out of its banality, brutality, and beauty. Over four weeks, we will saturate this blueprint with a Catalog of Turns, organized into six essential narrative provocations:
The Process
Participants will work recursively, using these micro-turns to continuously rethink and expand their macro-picture. We will examine select examples from literature to understand the conditions and consequences of these "turns." The turns you select—either by choice or by random draw—will provoke your character's next move or unearth the backstory necessary to make that turn earned. We will discuss how to move from a "vertical" plot (what happens next) to a "horizontal" reality, where we see how "the end of the story was somehow always present in the beginning."
The Outcome
By the end of this workshop, writers will leave with a fleshed-out story or a sophisticated structural framework for a novel. The ideal participant has either taken Techniques of Realism or has a story idea or short draft they are ready to explore. Our goal is to master the "Turn," to provide you with a scaffolded framework to move beyond simple plotting and into the deeper architecture of literary fiction, where every fracture reveals a new way to see forward.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium
• Homework: Required
• Workshopping Drafts: Intensive
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C.I. Aki is a poet, essayist, editor, filmmaker, and educator based in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric and Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and his Masters in Theology and Philosophy at Vanderbilt Divinity School with a focus on critical theory. In 2012, Aki published his first short story, “A Withering Scar, a Thin Pin-Striped Suit, and 1,000 Judgments,” in 34th Parallel Magazine. 2014 he premiered his first short film, "The Runner," at the Capital City Black Film Festival. In 2015, he was a recipient of Vanderbilt’s Imagination Grant to carry out research in Spain for an ongoing documentary on flamenco he is producing. In 2017, Aki self-published an experiment in fiction and philosophy titled After Esther: The Red Book, an attempt to flesh out the ideas of love, desire, and difference he culminated in his master’s thesis at Vanderbilt.
Aki's debut collection of poems, The World Black, Beautiful, and Beast on April Gloaming Publishing, was released in May 2021 and ranked #3 by Readers Digest’s Top 14 Black Poets to Read in 2021. His monograph, "The Freedom of Color: Harouna Ouédraogo Paints the Future Freely Black," on the artwork of Burkina Faso painter Harouna Ouédraogo, was published by The Denver Quarterly Literary Magazine in 2022. Aki currently serves as one of the poetry editors for Waxing and Waning Literary Magazine and teaches English at Montgomery Bell Academy. You can follow him on Instagram @ soul_lit_writer and signup for his newsletter: forthenoones.substack.com.
"C.I.'s facilitation and pedagogy made the workshop interactive and immersive. He provided space for us to analyze and apply work, but also gave us great feedback and takeaways as we venture further into realism. Thankful for this class and its impact it will have on my storytelling."
"This was a fantastic class that taught and reviewed many of the creative writing tools and techniques I learned in high school, long, long ago. C.I. was a great teacher and the exercises were effective in demonstrating the techniques we learned."
