Muse & the Marketplace 2018

Fiction writers talk a lot—for good reason, and to good end—about character, point of view, dialogue, scene, and summary, but in my experience, we don’t talk enough about mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction. It’s not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. But if stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience whatever doesn’t make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood. They are how we stand in the presence of mystery. Flannery O’Connor describes that “extra ingredient,” which she suggested is created when “a writer puts us in the middle of some human action as it is outlined and illuminated by mystery.” So where is this ghostly electricity located, and how do you conjure it? How do we create inclusive, compelling mystery and avoid the kind that leaves a reader confounded to the point of throwing her out of the dream of the story? This will be part lecture, part discussion, and part writing. We'll take a close look at examples of the ways writers make room for mystery on the page, and you are welcome to bring an excerpt of something in progress.

Using the death or abuse of an animal as an objective correlative? Maybe those ellipses in your dialogue should be em-dashes? Describing a location or a moment using an adjective-adjective-noun construction (e.g. the big, beautiful lake)? Some of our writerly ticks and tendencies are so ubiquitous that an editor may pass over a story or essay simply for the fact that they've seen the same missteps time and again. In this session, we'll examine some of the most common contemporary writerly cliches and discuss strategies for editing them out of work prior to submitting them to journals and publishers. 

Dialogue is the human voice on the page. What purpose does dialogue have in prose? We will examine invented dialogue for fiction, interviews and quotes for nonfiction, and remembered dialogue for memoir writing. In this one hour session, learn tips and tools for writing effective dialogue in fiction and nonfiction.