INSTRUCTOR: Marian Szczepanski
TIME: Saturday, May 4th, 1-4 PM
PRICE: Early-Bird until Monday, April 29th: $45 for members, $60 for non-members. After Monday, April 29th: $55 for members, $70 for non-members. Become a member here. Scholarships available here.
LOCATION: Writespace at Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards #208, Houston, TX 77007
LEVEL: All Levels
CAP: Limited to 15 Writers

When we write, we often first rely on painting a scene readers can see. Letting a reader “see the scene” is important, but so often writing that focuses solely on the sense of sight can lack a certain vivacity that characterizes great writing. Our characters, like our readers, have four other senses—hearing, taste, smell, and touch—and each one offers us countless opportunities to render those characters’ experiences more vividly. By extension, readers’ experience of reading fiction, memoir, and/or creative nonfiction enlivened by sensory details will be deeper, more compelling, and, yes, visceral. Allowing your characters to hear, taste, smell, and touch enables a writer to create, not just a story, but a palpable world readers are eager to enter and reluctant to leave.

We’ll read and discuss examples of sensory detail in narrative excerpts by renowned contemporary writers such as Lily King, Michael Ondaatje, Anthony Doerr, Chitra Divakaruni, and Lauren Groff, and others. The workshop also will include in-class writing prompts designed to vivify our work. Please bring your writing tool of choice (laptop, tablet, or paper and pen). If you’d like to bring a few pages of a piece you’re working on, you’re welcome to, but this is not required. All participants will receive a handout containing excerpts, writing exercises, and bibliography of works cited.