Description
What keeps you up at night? Let yourself fall into that darkest fear and play out different scenarios. This workshop will start by examining different types of fear as portrayed in fiction. We will dig into examples of fiction writers mining their own fears for literary effect. Then participants will tackle their own fears with a series of writing exercises designed to dig into the powerful emotions undergirding our phobias and put them to work in our fiction. Are you afraid of growing old, not finishing your book, being alone, being irrelevant, or embarrassing yourself? Are you afraid of the dark, thunderstorms, snakes, or your mother? In this workshop, participants will name their fears and dig into them, searching for those deep reasons for our fears and how we can make those emotions do some heavy lifting in our writing. What’s the worst thing that could happen? How could it be averted? How would different characters respond? Who rises to the challenge? Who crumbles? Who is not afraid? And most importantly, why?
Writing about things that scare us can be powerful and therapeutic. Playing out our worst fears gives us emotional power over them. Participants will leave this workshop with a catalog of their own fears and ideas for how to harness them into literary power. We will close the workshop by flipping it on its head and listing the things that bring us joy and repeating a mini version of the exercise but from a framework of examining how to transfer our joy — along with our fears — onto the page.
Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Last Beekeeper and Waiting for the Night Song, a CNN, USA Today, Parade, and Newsweek Most Anticipated 2021 novel and an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Book of the Month. She is a Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Novel Incubator alum, and she holds a Master’s in Creative Writing and Literature from Harvard. Her writing has appeared in BusinessWeek, The Boston Globe, The Hollywood Reporter, Orion, Chicago Review of Books, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and other publications. She is the winner of the William Faulkner Literary Award and the Writer’s League of Texas award for contemporary and literary fiction, and was a finalist for the Silver Falchion Award for best suspense novel and the Caledonia Novel Award. With a background in agriculture and beekeeping, she is a frequent speaker on the topic of fiction in the age of climate crisis at universities, museums, libraries, conferences, and book festivals. In addition to lecturing and teaching writing workshops, she has provided critiques on approximately 30 manuscripts over the past seven years. She is currently working on her third novel, slated for publication in 2025.
