The Muse & the Marketplace 2016

Secret, lies, evasions, deceptions: what’s hidden and how it emerges fuel narrative drive and tension in stories, whether the subject is concealment within a relationship or who committed a murder, the outcome comic or tragic. In this workshop we’ll look at the set up of secrets and some of the many options for when and how they come out, partially or fully. We’ll discuss clues, misinterpretations, discoveries, revelations, suspense, surprise, and what’s known when by which characters and the reader. We’ll focus, especially, on how this relates to the writer’s choices about structure and presentation: point of view, placement of information about the past, what’s onstage and off, narrative disclosure, and outcome. Though this class will use examples from fiction, film, and drama, the content is also useful to those writing memoir or narrative non-fiction.