Advanced Fiction

The Crafting of Fiction is the highest level Writing course in the CTY program. In prerequisites, the course requires Crafting the Essay and at least one Critical Essay course. Its course code is FICT, and it is offered only at Saratoga Springs. It is now called Advanced Fiction.

Course Description

The Crafting of Fiction is a very advanced class for devoted writing students. To complete the course, a student is required to present two works of short fiction.

This course is an in-depth look at fictitious stories and the methods used to write them; the instructor, Mike Martin, has been teaching at CTY for ten years, has taught Lady GaGa (Stefani Germanotta), and contributes enormously to the growth of young writers. Not only do you write two stories during the course of three weeks, but you come home with prompts and suggestions to improve your writing in the future.

The instructor, Mike, is basically fantastic. We're pretty sure he has ADD and will have random outbursts which are extremely hilarious. In 2010, session 1, he was discussing how he hates that all blues music is the same. He sang a random tune and that become one of the many inside jokes. "Woke up one mornin'...shot ma woman in the head". Because it was a writing class, we got to use laptops and had flashdrives to transfer files for workshopping. One time, in the middle of class Mike was looking for his flashdrive and one of the students held it up to show they had it. Without warning, Mike burst into song saying, "Funky Funky Flash Drive!" in the tune of "everybody dance now". From then on, whenever we were together as a class, like at symposiums or rounding up in the morning or after meals, someone would yell FUNKY FUNKY FLASH DRIVE and everyone in the class would start dancing and singing along. All of these inside jokes are part of the reason kids keep coming back after doing the prerequisites to take Fiction because the class is always so cool.