Writer's Craft Session

No matter what stage you may be in with your writing, it’s important to learn about the publishing process. And typically the first person you’ll encounter on the road to getting published is a literary agent. Katherine Fausset, a Senior Agent and Vice President at Curtis Brown, Ltd., will share her tips and advice on what you can do to improve your chances of signing with an agent before you even start the querying process; how to find an agent who’s right for you; what to include in the all-important query letter; and what the writer-agent relationship looks like and how to make the most of it. This is a chance to ask an agent anything—whether it’s about a specific question about the querying process or a general one about the publishing industry—so please feel free to come with questions.

Writers are always asked, where do you get your ideas from? But maybe the better question is how we move from ideas to consistent writing, and to an active manuscript (whether building toward a story, novella, novel or script). This workshop will focus on specific techniques and strategies for getting past self-doubt and procrastination in the writing process. Bring a pen and notepad for brief in-workshop writing exercises.

This craft session examines the ways in which writers build stories out of things not there—missing people, lost dreams, misplaced memories, and narrative gaps, as well as various other specters, shadows, hallucinations and dark holes. Miles Harvey’s debut short story collection, The Registry of Forgotten Objects, probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. This session will be helpful for fiction and nonfiction writers, and will include some writing time.

Join Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Cunningham for an immersive, audience-involved workshop on the ways writers create dramatic scenes, often using outwardly undramatic exchanges and situations. Fiction comes most fully to life when its characters tell readers a little more than they’d consciously intended to. For this session, Cunningham will stage a spontaneous public conversation with a volunteer from the audience, and then discuss as a group the ways a fiction writer might have used the conversation’s content as the basis for a scene in a novel or short story—everything from offhand remarks to unconscious physical gestures. The choices a writer makes—even at the fundamental level of deciding on which details to include versus which to omit—can make a crucial difference in the tone and mood of a scene.  A fiction writer can, essentially, use the same fundamental material to write a scene that will play as comic, or ominous, or whatever other mood contributes to the writer’s more general intentions.

Usually, as writers, we really want to build up to that big important part of a poem, but what’s really interesting is what happens AFTER that. Usually when people think of endings, they think of silence, a completely closed, shut-off  ending. But there’s so much power in what happens after we’ve said what we think we need to say. In this poetry craft session, we’ll talk about art, writing, memory, music, and how all of that can conjure memories, and how we can start writing about an event—but also what happens after that and the feelings that occur that can make our writing more powerful.

Stories come to us from many sources, the most common being from memory, a conversation, or an image. The opening pages of Chin-Sun Lee’s debut novel Upcountry were initially inspired by a singular image: a drained and decayed swimming pool enclosed by a chain-link fence. In this workshop, we’ll focus on the ways that images can provoke associations that in turn, become compelling narrative. We’ll spend the first half of the workshop reading and discussing some examples of potent imagery and description. Then we’ll have a writing session based on an image—provided by Chin-Sun or participants can use any of their own—with sharing (for those inclined) and brief critiques to follow afterward.

Once upon a time--but when?! And they all lived happily ever--never! The fairy tale, that most venerated form among all fantastical narratives, has been with us from the start, though in truth fairy tales are far more than just bedtime stories for children, fodder for Disney adaptations, or bleak German cautionary tales with unaccountably violent endings. Fairy tales transport us to wondrous realms with a twisted logic all their own. They’re scary, and oddball, and achingly human. Not to mention the fact that they provide us with a unique and valuable framework through which to observe the complexities of our own modern world in all its absurdity, its heartbreak, and its horror. Through group discussion, targeted writing prompts, and examining excerpts from some of the original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (and sure, maybe one by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth), as well as the fiction of Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Victor LaValle, Brian Evenson, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, among others, this craft session with story writer and novelist Adrian Van Young (adrianvanyoung.com) will focus on revisiting, adapting and incorporating fairy tales and their archetypes to suit a modern adult readership. Spread your dragon’s wings and soar! 

Have you ever had a character live their lives in everyday spaces—the office, the grocery store, their house, the car—and feel that what you are writing is simply pushing your character through the tedious motions of life? In some ways, fiction is poignant because it can reflect reality and open vistas of understanding through realistic perspectives. But isn’t reality also weird? Sometimes the best way to invigorate a scene is to do just that: make it weird. In this session, we will discuss ways to inject the uncanny and absurd into our writing, how to notice and compile the strangeness we see in our daily lives, and exercises we can do if we feel our stories are stuck in the mundane world.

Adaptation is about love: Love of content. Love of craft. Love of genre. Come by and we’ll take some time to be wildly in love with language. Adaptation can help us take the things we love and explore them with a newfound intimacy. It can help beginners hone their craft and help unestablished writers sell their work. It can help experienced writers connect with new methodologies and help anyone explore a new genre. It’s a great way to start writing and a great way to grow as a writer. Adaptations can let us come back to ourselves and our craft from a new perspective. We’ll ask a lot of bonding questions: Why adapt something from one genre to another? How do we pick what to adapt? What is source material to us, and why do we want to work with it? How do we pick what genre to adapt source material into? We’ll spend time with the slippery-yet-empowering transition when the adaptation becomes our own artwork!