On November 13, please join us for Real Talk, a Writer's Studio workshop hosted by Georgina Beaty.
How can you craft a story (fiction or non) from real events and interviews? The class will be centered on gathering verbatim material: how to choose a strong overall topic, what makes a good question, various ways of gathering and notating material, and how to craft that raw text into something that lifts off into story. We’ll look at short excerpts from verbatim and autofiction texts, and you’ll have a chance to try out the form yourself. Whether you’re a fiction lover who wants to work on dialogue and the specificity of character voice or whether you have a larger documentary-style fiction project in mind, this workshop will offer a taster of what’s possible when you are working from the material of real life.
Before turning to fiction writing, Georgina Beaty spent a decade as an actor and theatre maker, often working in verbatim (or documentary) forms with the company she co-founded, Architect Theatre. Her book of short stories, The Party is Here is, to a great extent, inspired by the real, though taken to an extremely fictional place! You can find her as a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford or working away on her next book.