Raising the Stakes in Fiction: A Craft Talk with Deesha Philyaw (CRAFT TALK SERIES)
ABOUT THE CRAFT TALK
What's at stake for your characters? If the stakes are low or unclear, readers are going to wonder, “So what?” And if we want readers to keep reading, we’d better have an answer to that question. So we raise the stakes for our characters. What do they have to lose? What are they trying to gain? What's standing in the way between them and what they want?
In this Roots. Wounds. Words. Craft Talk, we’re going to talk about and practice different ways to raise the stakes in fiction. You'll work with characters from your story-in-progress, or start fresh on a new story.
Date & Time: June 10, 2021 at 7 EST
Duration: 1.5 hours
Tuition: $30
Capacity: Limited. Seats are filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
Venue: Online. Link to the Craft Talk will be emailed in the week leading up to it.
ABOUT THE MASTER STORYTELLER:
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and is being developed for HBO Max by Tessa Thompson.
Philyaw is also the coauthor of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as a Notable Mention in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, Dead Housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People.
ABOUT THE CRAFT TALK
What's at stake for your characters? If the stakes are low or unclear, readers are going to wonder, “So what?” And if we want readers to keep reading, we’d better have an answer to that question. So we raise the stakes for our characters. What do they have to lose? What are they trying to gain? What's standing in the way between them and what they want?
In this Roots. Wounds. Words. Craft Talk, we’re going to talk about and practice different ways to raise the stakes in fiction. You'll work with characters from your story-in-progress, or start fresh on a new story.
Date & Time: June 10, 2021 at 7 EST
Duration: 1.5 hours
Tuition: $30
Capacity: Limited. Seats are filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
Venue: Online. Link to the Craft Talk will be emailed in the week leading up to it.
ABOUT THE MASTER STORYTELLER:
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and is being developed for HBO Max by Tessa Thompson. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church. Philyaw is also the coauthor of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as a Notable Mention in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, Dead Housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies. Philyaw is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People.