Muse & the Marketplace 2018

Secret, lies, evasions, and masquerades: what's hidden and how it emerges fuel narrative drive and tension in stories, whether the subject is deception within a relationship or who committed a murder, a spy story or the tale of a family's hidden past. In this workshop we'll look at the power of secrets, the motives for concealment, and the complications that happen when the truth—all of it or just a sliver—is discovered. We'll discuss clues, misinterpretations, discoveries, revelations, suspense, surprise, and what's known when by which characters and the reader. We'll focus, especially, on how this relates to the writer's choices about structure and presentation: point of view, placement of information about the past, what's onstage and off, narrative disclosure, and outcome. Though this class will use examples from fiction, film, and drama, the content is also useful to those writing memoir or narrative non-fiction.