MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM—ALL THE LITTLE SECRETS

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.