The Muse & the Marketplace 2016

The reason fiction continues to thrive as an art form is that its dramas play out in the singular realm of the human imagination, where the exterior and interior worlds meet. Novels and stories are imaginative interfaces. Together, the author and the reader create a living landscape that is more complete, immersive, and charged with meaning than the expensively produced moving images on even the most high fidelity flat screen. But how does a writer go about triggering this magical act of co-creation? The answer, at least in part, is that we allow the reader to experience the exterior world from inside a particular character. This concept is known as interiority. In this dynamic session, a discussion of selected passages from great works of fiction and memoir will highlight a range of approaches to interiority, including the free indirect style, the objective-correlative, psychologically slanted descriptive writing, flashback and backstory, dreams and visions, how to use conflicting feelings and micro-tension to create an irresistibly fraught internal experience, and more.