This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.

The Craft of Writing Scenes

Almost all of us have a story or two that we love to tell, stories worn smooth with retelling. They are some of our best work, having over many months or years taught us which words to linger on, or when to pause for laughter. We may even have reordered the events for the sake of clarity, poignance or suspense. Writers at all experience levels learn about the important difference between “telling” and “showing” in a story. In this workshop we will begin, through an investigation of “scene” to stitch the two together. We will look at all the essential components of scenes in prose forms, and develop an understanding of how, taken together, these individual elements themselves can become the building blocks for a moving story.

We will discuss the elements that comprise a scene, such as objects, details, dialogue, logistics, order, pace, and more. We will also conduct mini-workshops on scenes we have written ourselves, fine-tuning them to hold all the important components of our stories, and we will analyze, via close-reading, work from writers such as Gustav Flaubert, James Salter, Lydia Davis, Raymond Chandler, Bryan Washington, Rachel Cusk, J. D. Salinger, Alice Munro, and others, to enrich our understanding of all things scene should (and should not!) do.