This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House
Love Stories: How Romance and Relationships Power Fiction
Romance is the fastest-booming sector in publishing and a flashpoint of literary social media. But don’t judge Romance by its bodice-ripping cover. Love stories are as old as writing itself.
In this workshop, participants will explore how relationships—romantic, familial, platonic—serve as narrative rocket fuel. They create tension, momentum, and emotional charge on the page. Participants will learn how to use setting, dialogue, gesture, physicality, and even trope to make their fiction more propulsive.
Through close readings of authors such as Annie Proulx, Stuart Dybek, Jane Austen, and Sally Rooney, participants will break “romance” into its craft elements and see how these techniques can energize any story. In class, participants will discuss readings and complete short generative exercises that translate relationship dynamics into narrative action.
For workshop, participants may submit a short story or a scene from a longer project that centers a powerful interpersonal connection as a primary engine of the narrative.
IRIS CRONIN is a fiction writer, playwright, translator, teacher, and native Houstonian. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she was an Inprint Sustaining the Writing Life Fellow and a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar. She has taught English, French, and creative writing in many venues, including the Brown University Francophone Studies Department and the Young Writer’s Workshop at the University of Virginia.