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Fiction & Poetry |
Fiction 9:00AM – 9:50AM Writing
a novel that will capture the attention of readers (and agents) is
incredibly hard for many aspiring authors, but there is a ‘secret story
sauce’ that can help you navigate the dark (often unmarked) highways and
byways of the writing and editing process. In this workshop, I will
teach you the two key steps necessary to create a novel that will turn
casual readers into super-fans!
10:00AM – 10:50AM The session will focus on the importance of seeing the characters that you create as fully human, and propose that writing them through empathetic eyes will make them realer to you, thereby making them fully-breathed folk to your readers (even your villains!). Participants will discuss characters from other work that they felt empathetic towards, those that they didn’t, and talk about possible reasons why. We will also use writing prompts to guide us towards writing with an empathetic eye.
11:00AM – 11:50AM We love unreliable narrators like Amy Dunne from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but we rarely talk about how such narrators are written and what makes those characters so memorable. Luckily, this is a technique that can be traced back to the earliest forms of Greek literature such as Homer’s epic poem "The Odyssey" and can be utilized regardless of genre. So this session will answer the other big questions about this approach to viewpoint: What’s the best way to incorporate an unreliable narrator? What are the benefits/pitfalls of the technique? How do we make our unreliable narrator empathetic enough that readers stay until the end? And most importantly, how can writers reveal their unreliable narrator without angering the audience? ![]()
For a work of fiction to be worth reading, it must be real. It must ring true. It must be authentic. Even science fiction and fantasy need to contain elements of reality in the human condition and experience. How can you best incorporate these elements into your writing? By writing what you know. Research is a big part of writing, but knowledge and experience are crucial for your writing to have an enjoyable and memorable impact on readers. We’ll discuss turning your own knowledge and experience into unforgettable stories people will be clamoring to get their hands on.
2:30PM – 3:30PM Whoever (or whatever) your antagonist is, they should never be boring—your antagonist is what drives the story! Explore some of your favorite villains in storytelling—from the love-to-hate-ems to the morally gray ones—and see what makes them such interesting characters, so you can create your own who can stand in your hero’s way.
. | Poetry
The line is the one thing that differentiates poetry from prose and yet so many poets don't consider the line as a thing unto itself; much is made about line breaks but the break doesn't only determine where one line ends, but also defines where the next one begins, and as such is the very essence of poetic craft.
10:00AM – 10:50AM In this writing workshop, we’ll use sensory stimuli to summon what the French novelist Marcel Proust called “involuntary memories” which may be the start of fresh, new writing. In my long career leading creative writing workshops with students in grade school, universities, and senior citizen centers, I have used this exercise with great success; perhaps because the ever-judgmental mind is disabled and the limbic system is engaged, the writing produced is always authentic, vibrant, and powerfully palpable.
11:00AM – 11:50AM Maybe because we’re bilaterally symmetrical, human people tend to think in binaries and dichotomies. We love to divide things up, especially into multiples of two, and then privilege one of them—like the deep divide that’s so often assumed between human and nonhuman life. This interactive presentation dips into a scattering of poems focused on the specific, the nonhuman, and the places where human and nonhuman intersect—a loose taxonomy of the approaches that get lumped together as “nature poetry”, from meditations to elegies, histories, celebrations, and wild leaps of imagination–to name just a few. This will provide a springboard for participants to work on their own such poems during the session, and, if they wish, to share some. Handouts provided.
1:30PM – 2:20PM In this workshop, we will explore several approaches to title a poem, or story, including the approaches of location, character, preview, theme, and/or slant, with examples from poets Chen Chen, Jericho Brown, Maggie Smith, and other leading lights to get our juices jazzed. After discussion, there will be a generative portion, so please bring a draft poem with which to play. Though focusing on poems, this can work for stories and nonfiction too.
2:30PM – 3:30PM In this generative workshop, participants will look at model poems, then have time to write their own syllabic verse. There are two types of syllabics: normative—in which all lines in the poem have the same number of syllables, and quantitative—in which each line of a stanza contains the same number of syllables as its corresponding line in subsequent stanzas. Syllabic prosody is the foundation of most poetry written in Japanese, and is found also in Romance languages, but it is relatively rare in English. We'll look at examples by Marianne Moore, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, N. Scott Momaday and others for inspiration.
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