Workshop: Fiction
This workshop is full. Please email Gibson at gibson@mainewriters.org to be added to the waiting list.
Thinking in Book
Fiction Writing with Susan Conley
In this workshop, we'll talk and think intentionally about your book— the book you most want to write and how. To "think in book" sometimes requires a shift so that you can say very intentionally in our workshop: here is the book I’m writing. This is my goal. Here is my probable structure for the novel or the collection of stories. Together, we'll work with innovative prompts each day to generate new material within the framework of the project you've named—this may mean working on one specific scene or chapter(s) or short story or beginning or ending. Together we'll also examine craft tools within the context of your book: amazingly handy tools like building tension and escalation and overstory and understory and befriending dialogue and pacing and plot causality and vibe and voice. All the while we’ll be keeping an eye on the structure of the book project each of you is imagining, so that you can be clear about the “lane” your book wants to live in.
SUBMIT
After registering, participants in the fiction workshop are asked to submit the following materials:
Two pages from the very beginning of the book. This may be a book that is still in its most nascent form and only exists in your mind. That’s FINE. There is no wrong way to do this workshop. So regardless of where you are in your project, send what you imagine might be the opening two pages.
A one-page “greatest hits” description of the book’s central tensions/questions/conflicts. This can be done in list format or in paragraphs or anything in-between. Have fun and be as detailed as possible.
A two page, highly cinematic, dialogue-driven scene that is grounded in time and place and is, in your mind, one of the scenes of greatest tension/conflict in the book (there may be several of these scenes, but this is a crucial one). Tell us the approximate page/placement in the book this scene will take place.
Please submit these materials by no later than 9:00 a.m. on May 4. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to gibson@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “Conley BLACK FLY MSS.” *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF.
Susan Conley is the author of five critically acclaimed books, including her recent, best-selling novel Landslide, which was a New York Times Book Review’s Editor’s Choice, a Today Show Summer Read, and a Best Book for Good Morning America, The New York Post, Medium, Bustle, and others. She’s been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She's won the Maine Book Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence and has been a featured Tedx Speaker, where her talk the "Power of Story," has been viewed widely. She teaches on the faculty of the Stonecoast Writers Program at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, where she’s also the co-founder of the Telling Room, a youth creative writing center.