The Muse & The Marketplace 2024

What keeps you up at night? Are you afraid of growing old, not finishing your book, being alone, being irrelevant, or embarrassing yourself in public? Are you afraid of the dark, thunderstorms, snakes, or your mother? This session will start by digging into examples from fiction writers who mine their fear for literary effect. We will tackle our own fears with a series of writing exercises designed to dig into the powerful emotions undergirding our phobias. We will dig into those scary feelings and harness them into doing some heavy lifting on the page. You will leave this session with a better understanding of how writing about things that scare us can be powerful and therapeutic. And, if we're brave enough, it can lead to terrifyingly sharp prose!