More and more, popular culture has been fascinated by narratives that depict coming of age from the perspective of the child in the form of memoir, often demonstrating cultural diversity.
This workshop will focus stories drawn from participants’ own life experiences that have certain fictional elements and are structured like fiction. During each week of the course, we will write short pieces of memoir, based on the following: certain places and individuals you remember, certain traditions and even collective traumas that predate the first-person narrator, certain positive events as well as troubling events, with the liberty to fictionalize and embellish the autobiographical story. We will develop a foundation for the elements of fiction: plot, character, internal monologue, and dialogue while studying published works in the genre.
Live video conference: This workshop will be held via our online video conferencing platform, Zoom. You can view brief tutorials on using the platform here. On the start date or the day before, participants will receive an email with login info (please check your spam if you don’t see it).
In this workshop you’ll learn:
- The use of the first person
- The structure of plot, rising action, conflict, partial resolution, further conflict, flashbacks and chronology
- Dialogue
- Character development
- Concrete detail
- How to use realistic dialogue that advances the story and achieves intended coherence or, conversely, artistic postmodernist subversion of conventional coherence
Time requirements
- 3 hours minimum
Materials
- All reading materials will be provided.
If you need an accommodation for this workshop, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.
