Lit Fest 2025

The “inciting incident” is the narrative event that propels your whole story into forward motion. But what should the inciting incident be, and where? Does “inciting” also mean “exciting”? What makes it work, and what makes it flop? By exploring elements such as stakes and dramatic questions, we’ll look at ways to heighten that inciting incident to invite your reader into your protagonist’s lovable disaster. Open to all prose writers.

Scenes are the engine that makes a story “go.” Right now you may be saying, yes, yes, I know how to write a scene, scenes are easy. But they’re really not, and many writers believe they’re writing a scene when they’re really writing summary or description or something else. So what's the difference between a dynamic scene that leaps off the page and a dull one that just lies there, snoring? In this class, we'll investigate scene-building techniques such as conflict-driven action, setting, situation, sensory language, dramatic pacing, surprise, tension, and suspense, so you can create that must-turn-the-page feeling.

Dramatic stories tend to focus on negative events and bad things happening to all kinds of people. In this class, we'll flip the script and work through examples, exercises, and discussion to examine what it would mean to write a happy story, how to go about it, why we usually don't, and what happy story elements we can use to enrich our more typical, more unhappy stories.

With jobs and family/personal responsibilities, sustaining a writing practice seems harder these days than ever before. We struggle to find the time and energy to find our way into our creative space. This course will offer prompts and habit-building techniques to help us sustain our writing practices, whether to exercise our muscles or to make it through long-term projects.

Most of us aren't able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation,” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Beyond the fantasy of a consistent work/life balance, this lecture considers the root of vocation: both the labor of writing and the “calling out.” Through what forms and technologies are we able to be heard?