The Muse & The Marketplace 2020

As writers, we’re already personally familiar with how it feels to be moving through one reality in the physical world while our minds are often somewhere else – but how do you narrate such a scenario for your characters? We’ll take a look at a wide range of literary characters with active fantasy lives to answer this question. Walter Mitty is the classic example, but we’ll also look at additional historic and contemporary examples of literary characters whose reality is deeply affected by their fantasy lives. We’ll also study examples of non-fiction – like the best-selling memoir Educated – in which the narrative is propelled partly by the tension between the fantasy upheld by the author’s family and her experiences in the “real” world.

Along the way we’ll discuss how illuminating characters’ fantasy lives is a kind of hack. Why? Because accessing their fantasies allows you to convey your characters’ deepest fears and desires, urges and inhibitions, through the stories they dream up. You’re not stuck having characters think explicitly about their fears and desires — instead, they tell themselves a story that reveals aspects of their interior life that they, themselves, might be blind to. Whether it’s Sylvia Plath imagining herself as a fig tree or George Saunders’ lonely barber crafting elaborate erotic daydreams that fall apart even in his imagination, giving your characters active fantasy lives is a great way to reveal interiority, create tension between characters with competing fantasies, and propel your plot forward.



Come ready to talk about your fictional characters’ fantasy lives or – for the bravest among us – your own!