COST: $65 for members; $80 for non-members

DATE: Saturday, August 25, 2018

TIME: 9:00 – 12:00 p.m.

LOCATION: St. John’s Church Parish Hall in Church Hill. 2401 E Broad St, Richmond, VA 23223

DESCRIPTION:

Focus: Structure for Stories both Big and Small

So, if you’re like me, you have twenty different ideas about a hundred different stories that have been told a million times. That said, whether in a long piece of fiction or a short personal essay, there are specific tools writers use to structure their story into a narrative. Likewise, the reader needs to follow you, and they, too, come to your story with their own ideas, stories, and past experiences, which they tell and re-tell in their own way however many times in however many voices in whatever order they want. So, we have a big task at hand: Tell your story to the reader in a way that is both organically your own and can connect with a stranger.

TAKEAWAYS

We will focus on various types of narrative structure through examples across all types of forms and genres. Specifically, we’ll look at three different models to see how they work, what is gained and what is lost, and how you can benefit by looking at your story through different narrative structures.

INSTRUCTOR

Patrick Dacey is the author of the novel, The Outer Cape, an Amazon Editor’s Pick, and the collection of stories, We’ve Already Gone This Far, selected by the American Bookseller’s Association as a Top Ten Debut. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and has taught writing at various schools, including the College of William and Mary. His stories have been featured in The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and Guernica, among other publications.