This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Mining the truth: How to build compelling characters and scenes from immersive reporting
Immersive research can enhance and add texture to everyone’s memoir, nonfiction story or a work of realistic or historic fiction. In this hands-on class, we’ll work together to explore creative ideas and tackle hands-on exercises that can be used to build compelling characters, and dialogue, and to explore deeper meanings in narratives and scenes.
We will delve into techniques for creative forms of immersive research, including using images, mining memories, analyzing obscure documents and conducting interviews. Together the group will explore ideas, examples and alternatives ways to fuse writing and research that deepen specific areas of interest for their project. Participants have the option to submit general topics and early drafts to the instructor before the workshop.
LISE OLSEN is the author of two books. Her first, Code of Silence, won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Nonfiction and the Investigative Reporters & Editors’ (IRE) Book Award in 2022. Her latest, The Scientist & The Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys, was published in April by Random House. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction and has previously taught narrative writing and investigative techniques in more than a dozen countries for various organizations, including Inprint, IRE and The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s investigations editor for the Texas Observer and her work on cold cases, corruption, environmental disasters and myriad topics has been featured in the Houston Chronicle, and in several documentaries, including Netflix’s The Texas Killing Fields, CNN’s The Wrong Man, The Pillowcase Murders on Paramount+, and the six-part A&E series The Eleven.
