4-Week: Craft Lessons from Gabriel García Márquez

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice….” Who can possibly forget the opening sentence of Gabriel García Marquez’s magisterial novel One Hundred Years of Solitude? What reader is not immediately pulled in by the sentence’s sly juxtaposition of violence and nostalgia, its soft-shoe tap-dance through time? What writer does not feel a tinge of wonder—and jealousy—at the way the complexity of the sentence’s construction is obscured by its ease and grace? In this class, we’ll look at this single sentence, and all the other sentences that follow it, to figure out what writerly craft lessons we can learn from García Marquez’s masterpiece. If you're interested in how to write within a magic realist framework, or how to write a family saga, or how to play around with time, or how to write about place—or if you just love this book like so many others—this class is for you. We’ll consider the novel’s structure, its treatment of character, the way it handles narrative time. We’ll take a look at its use of voice, POV, and milieu, particularly how these elements contribute to the novel’s success in blending the “real” with the magical. We’ll ponder some of the novel’s thematic concerns, as well as how to build upon its legacy. And we’ll ask ourselves how all of these questions, techniques, and considerations can inform and enhance our own writing.

Required Text: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Marquez