The Writer's Studio: Making Mysterious People with Gabrielle Moyer

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You’ll leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

Making Mysterious People

How can we write a person, especially in a way that captures the authentic and mysterious in any particular person? And how can we write about others’ lives in a way that captures their uniqueness but also appeals to a broad audience? In this workshop we will look at a number of excerpts from Modernist and contemporary writers as they seek to describe the mysteriousness of other people—in ways that may not even make sense to the authors themselves. We will explore how their deliberate attention to style and form help them depict the particular lives of others. After looking closely at some of their alternative styles for communicating character, you will experiment with constructing your own complex, particular person, or the space for a person (in a poem, in a film, in a fiction).

Gabrielle Moyer has published on Modernist fiction and the relationship between literary aesthetics and ethics. She is an Advanced lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric where she teaches on the political ramifications of telling stories and avoiding stories.