The Muse & the Marketplace 2016

Many writers shape excellent novels and stories from raw experience, and our lives as writers will always feed texture and circumstance to our fiction. But when something incredible, moving, or poignant happens to you for real, it does not mean that the same experience or stakes will translate cleanly onto the story page. This session introduces participants to a custom framework for fictionalizing autobiography: a series of questions a writer might ask herself, and principles she might apply, in order to best dramatize her real-life material. Wisdom from cross-genre writers like Dorothy Allison and Jeanette Winterson, who have so successfully interpreted their lives in both novels and memoirs, will inform our close reading and discussion. The session will then conclude with brief, exploratory writing prompts to summon and frame the lived experiences that pester you to get on the page.