The Advanced Fiction Writing course allows students to further develop their fiction writing skills. On Wednesday, Dec. 11th, the Advanced Fiction Writing course will present their public reading event in Laun 109, from 4-5 p.m. 

“The goal of the event is to showcase their developed skills in characterization, setting, plot, and theme through short stories. In addition, this experience will offer students some stage time to practice their delivery of prose to an audience. Reading fiction aloud is unlike acting, for the fact that writers are tasked with not becoming their characters but imagining them as they read,” said, Jodie Mortag, the teacher of the Advanced Fiction Class and the Assistant Professor of Composition 

Daniel Janeshek, a senior graduating this semester said, “We’re all here at Lakeland, we’re all working as hard as we can. We have all this weight on our shoulders that’s pushing us down a lot of pressure and going on, but then this is our opportunity for students to show what’s come of it, like how a diamond is made under the ground. We’ve all been there and this is a chance to see an advanced group of students show off their great work.” Janeshek is one of the six student writers presenting at the event. 

Beverly Foster, a senior, and also presenting her story, revealed her trials and errors during the process of creating her fiction piece. “The fun part was revising it because I had like 10 different versions of the story. And all of them was a little bit different. I played around with, of course, the third person versus first person, just to try to get anything I could get to work together and then I eventually got something that just kind of clicked on me. The same setting, the same characters, and the same basic plotline 10 different versions.” 

Heater Vrba, a junior, will be presenting her Science Fiction story. Vrba mentioned “Writing fiction, a lot of it is kind of organizing myself into different categories and those categories turn into characters of mine. I spend a lot of time developing characters to have certain traits that I also have, or some with little parts of me that aren’t normally seen. I like to put them in other characters so that they can be appreciated, or if there’s something I really like, it’s all in those characters.”  

Vrba also said, “At the end of the day, a fiction story, any kind of story is basically just the interaction of characters with each other and what they decide to do with each other, and having different parts of me interact, or refuse to interact is kind of fun because I feel like my soul, myself is being represented through these fictional beings, and it’s really fun to see them act in ways I can’t. Like in a magic story, having characters like ‘Oh, this person would act, I would do this, and this is how magic would happen,’ but we can’t do that in real life, so it’s nice to see those imaginations.” 

Each of the six students will be given ten minutes to read a portion of their story. Refreshments will be provided.