The Muse & the Marketplace 2016

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.