The Muse & The Marketplace 2020

Congratulations—you’ve sold your first novel. Now what? What can you expect in terms of the editorial process (including those dreaded copy edits and proofreading 1st, 2nd, and 3rd pass pages and beyond), title selection, cover design, publicity and marketing meetings, pre- and post-publication events, launch parties, most-anticipated and best-of lists, social media, book festivals, etc., etc.? No matter whether they’re with a Big Five or an indie press, first-time authors seem to agree that their year is a dizzying and confusing mix of terrifying and exhilarating. Two authors who have successfully made the transition from “writer” to “author” in 2019 share their tips on how best to launch your debut novel without going crazy.

The road to publishing an essay collection does not have to be a confusing process. In this workshop we will discuss how to polish single essays for journal submission, shop for journals that are a good fit for your work, and what nonfiction editors look for in submissions. We will then transition to strategies for compiling loose essays into a cohesive collection, including tips for writing between the "gaps" of your pieces, how to use key words as thematic anchors, and overall tips for structuring a strong collection.

In recent years climate change has risen to the forefront of human concerns. And yet, as David Wallace-Wells points out in his recent book, The Uninhabitable Earth, the dilemmas and dramas of our global environmental crisis are often mismatched to the kinds of stories we tell ourselves.  Can we address it in ways that are realistic and accessible, yet still leave space for hope and resiliency? How do writers address ecological catastrophe while still telling human stories of love, fear, grief, and longing that engage readers? This class will consider excerpts from authors such as Octavia Butler, Richard Powers, Cormac McCarthy, and Omar El Akkad, with the ultimate goal of helping participants formulate tools and strategies to address the changing planetary environment in their own work.

Short story collections are curious beasts. The individual stories are often the result of many drafts, intensive labor, and rounds of feedback from the workshop. Yet so often the manuscript as a whole is not given the same consideration, and may struggle to form a book, rather than a collection of discrete objects. What are the strategies a writer might use to tie a collection together? How might one use character, geography, theme, resonance of imagery, juxtaposition, and line-level echoes to achieve this goal? How do the stories speak to each other across the collection, and what opportunities might there be for narrative progression in the book? This session will examine these questions and more from an editor’s point of view.

Description coming soon!

Every writer of memoir and personal essay is at some point dogged with the question: who cares? As creative nonfiction writers, we can see beyond this question by locating socio-historical stories within our personal narratives, uncovering tales that are about much more than the individual narrator.

In this session, we’ll offer tips and techniques for identifying larger themes in your work, including how to avoid common pitfalls, and how to incorporate reporting techniques (such as interviews, historical research, and old advertisements and commercials) without losing your engaging personal voice. We’ll also provide examples from authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nick Flynn, and Jesmyn Ward, examining how personal narratives are often inseparable from larger histories, communities, and movements. You’ll leave with several examples and take-home writing exercises that will jump-start your efforts to expand the scope of your nonfiction narratives.

How do we write fiction and creative non-fiction that makes our readers feel love, hope, dread, sadness, and the whole range of emotion embodied in our work? While pacing, setting, and structure all come into the play, one of the most powerful (and often overlooked) techniques for any writer is the use of specific and significant details. But too much detail can backfire, and too little can take the reader out of the "dream." 

In this session, we will learn how to use details effectively so our readers share our characters’ emotional worlds. We’ll look at how specificity, filtering, and use of the active voice can build meaning for the reader. We’ll discuss examples from R.O. Kwon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Toni Morrison and end with a short writing exercise that will help us apply what we’ve learned.

Poets have used received forms for centuries, as their tight constraints prompt us to innovate constantly. But what if you want to write something more modern and unexpected-- a form of your own invention? Participants in this session will create a series of constraints to construct a form of poetry on their own. This exciting workshop will tempt writers into breaking all the rules of form poetry as we know it, in an attempt to create work new and unseen.

Perspective-- and point of view-- is arguably the most important craft element that every fiction writer must consider. But "perspective" takes on new meaning in the realm of young adult fiction, in which characters-- by virtue of their youth-- bring an urgency to the conflicts they navigate.

In this session, we'll discuss the unique challenges and opportunities of writing from the perspective of younger characters, and for a younger reading audience. We'll discuss particulars of voice, dialogue, plot (and sub-plots!), psychic narrative distance, and more, and the presenters will share their own "story behind the stories," and shifting perspectives, while writing their young adult novels. Come with questions about your young adult manuscripts or ideas for one, and leave with more perspective of your own.

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!

Try this: calculate the two-thirds mark in a piece of music and listen to see what happens at that point in time. Chances are, things become more complicated, denser. Melodies and patterns likely come to a sort of climax at right around that point in the music. Music isn't the only art form that often adheres to a structure of thirds. Some of the oldest narrative forms--fairy tales and folk tales--do too, and they've loaned their structure to many classic forms of narrative that follow.

In this session, we'll listen to short pieces by composers as wide-ranging as Wagner, Thomas Newman, Coltrane, and Beyoncé, among others, to hear how music tells its stories in three parts. You'll learn how to borrow from elements like the leitmotif, the coda, the refrain, to build stronger narrative structures for your novels, short fiction, and essays.

Description coming!

The “literary thriller” is, by definition, a hybrid genre, utilizing the techniques of great mysteries and thrillers—plot, pacing, unexpected twists, crime—to create a work of fiction that extends beyond mere potboiler and into the meaningful reservoir of literature. If that sounds simple, it isn’t. The literary thriller has a double job: It must work as a mystery thriller and as a resonant piece of writing. How do you manage to create the nail-biting tempo of a propulsive plot while managing to create meaning characters and ask the harder and less solvable questions? This seminar will offer some possibilities on style, structure, plotting, and ambitions when attempting to write a “literary thriller.” What makes a piece of work exciting literature? How do you stay true to plot and to character? How do you satisfy the reader's expectations and still feel you’ve written important material? A literary thriller can feel like trying to juggle rabid squirrels on fire, but this session will ask and answer these questions and more.