4-Week: Craft Lessons in Time from the Films of Richard Linklater

Over the past three decades, director Richard Linklater has repeatedly structured his films around the passage of time, with some, like 2004’s Before Sunset, taking place in-real time across an 80-minute conversation between two former lovers, and others, like 2014’s Boyhood, spanning twelve long years in the lives of both its characters and actors. Throughout this four-week fiction craft course, we’ll be watching and discussing four of Linklater’s most time-obsessed films, and using them—along with a few select flash fiction companion pieces—as gateways to discussing the role of time in narrative storytelling. In doing so, we’ll identify tips and tricks to incorporate Linklater’s approach to conveying the expansion, compression, and dilation of time into our own fiction.