Muse & the Marketplace 2019

Make your essay or long-form nonfiction pieces informative, engaging and persuasive by paying close attention to such fundamental elements as organization, observation, and argument. Clarify essential aspects that animate compelling narratives, including conflict, purpose and desire. Learn the importance of strong openings, nut graphs, scene-setting, skillful use of facts and figures, sensory evocation and choosing revelatory details. By adhering to a few critical aspects of nonfiction storytelling, you will illuminate the answers to questions most readers are likely to have, among them: 1) Why you are writing this piece now? and 2) Why is your work worth reading?

This session focuses on the art of writing humor, with a special focus on dark humor, the tragicomic, and satire.

Sex is an action like any other in fiction: it should reveal character, be relevant, and move the story forward. So why are sex scenes so difficult to write, and why, even in good stories and novels, are they often painfully awkward? What distinguishes a good sex scene from a bad one?

In this session, led by novelists Whitney Scharer and Chip Cheek, we will discuss the craft of writing sex scenes: practical suggestions, the problem of diction, what makes it gratuitous, and more. We’ll discuss writing about sex from different gender perspectives. And we’ll look at lots of examples—from hot to unsatisfying to laughably awful.

Adults only, please. This session will be NSFW.

Family sagas, tales passed through generations, and stories that travel the globe...those of us who love reading thick, epic novels often want to write one too. But this cumulative style of storytelling has unique demands. Join a fascinating Q&A with Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, on writing stories that span large swaths of time and geography. What are the uniques challenges of such a large scope? How to transition through huge leaps in time or location? How to sustain tension in a book that requires many hours to read? What research might be required, and how can you keep track of it all? And do epic stories take an epic time to write? Come prepared with your questions and ideas, and be ready to walk away one step closer in developing your epic manuscript.

The key to getting an op-ed, a reported article, or even an essay can lie in the perfect pitch. Editors don't have time to fill in the blanks of a great story idea that is imperfectly pitched. Knowing how to write an incisive compelling pitch is also essential for anyone who wants to approach a literary agent or editor.

This session will look at how editors pick work, the secrets of getting an editors' attention, crafting pitches that stand out, and, also as importantly, once you get the "yes," then what? This workshop will help you best present not only your material, but yourself as an author.

As writers, we often feel pressured to label our work, filing it under fiction or non-fiction, journalistic, commercial, or literary - but few readers have tastes that can be categorized by a single keyword. Life isn’t split up into mutually exclusive compartments, and it isn’t always possible, or even preferable, to write as if it were. Most of us live in a space where genres overlap, and it is only natural that our books follow suit. Increasingly, fiction is veering into realms that have traditionally been the province of non-fiction, and vice versa. Novels are being used to communicate concepts, becoming idea driven rather than plot driven, while non-fiction becomes less journalistic, and more personal and experiential.

In this seminar, we will deconstruct the characteristics of conventional fiction and non-fiction and discuss various ways of combining these elements, so as to best fit our unique, individual style, or to serve the particular project at hand.