Fiction and Fascination: How to Build Mystery into Your Writing at The Chattery

Mystery is the heart of all narrative, its pulse is the fine tension between question and perception, wonder and suspense.

For the purposes of this workshop our prose need not hinge on a crime, a culprit, or a private eye. We’ll build inquiry into fictional ecosystems and discuss how the mechanics of mystery (the structural and craft-oriented choices) can haunt, provoke, or fuse our prose. This class will benefit participants who have a vision for a project, but don’t know where to begin, as well as those who have a work or works in progress. The goal is to find the heart of the mystery in your project and deepen, develop, or pursue it—or to begin from a question or an inquiry and allow a world to blossom around it. Together, we’ll investigate different strategies for enhancing mystery, such as the uncanny coincidence, incongruous details, and repetition. We’ll analyze excerpts from mysterious works that demonstrate these techniques. We’ll generate new work modeled on these examples.

Cost: $28.52
Register: thechattery.org/classes/fiction-and-fascination-how-to-build-mystery-into-your-writing

Taught by Jessica Alexander in partnership with The Chattery.