CRW2100 – Fiction Writing is a 3-credit introductory course in writing short fiction. Institutions title it Fiction Writing, Introduction to Fiction Writing, and — at Daytona State College — Creative Writing. It is run as a workshop: students write stories, the class reads and discusses them, and the writer revises.
The workshop model is the defining feature and the thing prospective students should understand before enrolling. Work is distributed to classmates in advance and discussed openly while the author, by long convention in many workshops, listens without defending it. That is uncomfortable at first and is the fastest available way to learn how writing actually lands on readers rather than how it felt to write.
Content covers the elements of fiction — character, plot, setting, point of view, voice, dialogue, scene, and theme; point of view and its consequences, which beginners most often handle inconsistently; scene versus summary and controlling narrative distance; showing and telling and when each is correct; dialogue — subtext, attribution, and rhythm; structure — conflict, causality, and the shape of a short story; concrete detail and sensory specificity; openings and endings; revision as substantive rethinking rather than line-editing; reading as a writer — analyzing published stories for technique rather than for meaning; the workshop process — giving and receiving critique; and submission and publication practice where included.
Students typically write two or three complete short stories plus exercises, and revise at least one substantially.
Offered at approximately 11 Florida institutions.
Creative writing is rarely a direct occupation, and the course should be honest about that — but the skills it builds are broadly employable:
Work is read by classmates before class and discussed openly. In many workshops the author remains silent during the discussion of their own story — not as a hazing ritual, but because a writer will not be present to explain the story to its eventual readers, so the useful information is what the story conveys without help. The conventions that make this productive: critique addresses the work rather than the writer, responses are specific rather than evaluative ("I lost track of who was speaking on page three" beats "the dialogue was weak"), and the writer decides afterward which responses to act on. Not all critique is correct, and part of the skill is judging which is.
Students consistently report that diagnosing problems in other people's stories teaches them more than receiving critique on their own, because it is far easier to see a point-of-view slip or an unearned ending in someone else's draft. Students who skim classmates' submissions and arrive with vague responses get correspondingly less from the course, and give less.
The most common misunderstanding in a first writing course. Substantive revision may mean changing the point-of-view character, cutting the first three pages, relocating the story's beginning, or discovering that the real story is a subplot. Line editing is the last step, not the work. Instructors generally grade the revised story on whether the writer genuinely re-saw it, and a cleanly proofread version of the same draft usually does not earn much.
CRW2100 satisfies a general education humanities requirement at many Florida institutions — verify locally, as the classification varies — and transfers among Florida public institutions under SCNS. It is distinct from composition (ENC1101, ENC1102) and from literature courses, and does not substitute for them. Related creative writing courses carry their own numbers: CRW2001 (Introduction to Creative Writing, often multi-genre), CRW2300 (Poetry Writing), and CRW2201. SCNS equivalency applies to the same number at the same level, never across numbers — a program requiring the multi-genre introduction is not satisfied by the fiction course.
Student fiction sometimes draws on painful personal experience, and workshops encounter violence, abuse, grief, and trauma in submitted work. Reasonable norms — discussing the writing rather than speculating about the author's life, and keeping what appears in workshop within the room — are usually stated by the instructor and are worth taking seriously. Students should also know that a story written in first person is not an autobiographical statement, and neither classmates nor instructors should treat it as one.
Institutions and instructors differ, and policies are stated in the syllabus — but the point of a writing workshop is developing the student's own capability, and submitting machine-generated prose as original work defeats the purpose whether or not it is caught. Where AI use is permitted at all it is generally for brainstorming or feedback rather than drafting. Read the specific policy; do not assume.
Florida State University's creative writing program is nationally prominent, and the University of Florida and Florida International University maintain established MFA programs. Florida also hosts significant literary activity — the Key West Literary Seminar, Miami Book Fair, and Sanibel Island Writers Conference among them — several of which offer student rates or volunteer access. For a student who develops a serious interest, these are accessible next steps.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026