Write What You Don’t Know: A Fiction Workshop to Stretch Your Imagination

Write what you know? Instructor Steve Mitchel asks, “Where’s the fun in that?" In this one-day workshop, you’ll practice writing what you don’t know.

"There was a pattern to my early stories," Steve says. "Each one had a character who seemed to be an awful lot like me. Eventually, I realized that the Steve character was always the least interesting one in the story. Art really does imitate life.”

The goal of this workshop is to demystify the process of creating characters, settings, and stories that fall outside of our comfort zones—and to have fun while we're doing it! We'll look closely at the work of Ian McEwan, George Saunders, and others in order to uncover the ways in which stories not only take the reader to someplace s/he has never been, but take the writer there, as well. In a supportive environment, we’ll do writing exercises designed to encourage risk-taking in our stories. We’ll play around with time, point of view, characterization and setting as we discover the unlimited possibilities in our creative work.

"By the end of the day," Steve says, "you’ll have the confidence to explore your previously off-limits imaginative zones and be ready to draft what Tim O’Brien calls, 'a true story that never happened.'"