When: April 4th, 2022 | 10 AM Pacific (click here to convert to your time zone)
Where: Online via Zoom video conference
Price: Free!
If fiction’s war on exposition has a rallying cry it’s “Show, Don’t Tell.” Whether offered by teachers as a Rule of Writing or wielded as a cudgel by workshop peers, this phrase is often slapped on any expositional passage regardless of narrative needs. But why?
Author Kim Stanley Robinson says “…the advice “show don’t tell” is a zombie idea, killed forty years ago by the publication in English of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet still sadly wandering the literary landscape, confusing people.”
In this panel, authors Rebecca Makkai, Cecilia Tan, and K. Tempest Bradford will explore the idea that “Show, Don’t Tell” is an outdated and inherently colonialist piece of writing wisdom, and offer different frameworks for analyzing how and why exposition works in narrative, as well as giving you tools to determine what to tell, what to show, and how much space each tactic gets.
This panel is being recorded for our YouTube channel and will appear in our free resources later this year.
Panelists
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award; and it was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2018.
Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
Visit her at RebeccaMakkai.com or on twitter @rebeccamakkai.
Cecilia Tan is “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature” for her pioneering, award-winning efforts to combine erotica with fantasy and science fiction, according to Susie Bright. She is mixed-race (Chinese-filipino-Irish-Welsh), bisexual, bigender, poly, and kinky, and has been a longtime activist and organizer in the bi and BDSM communities. Though she holds a Masters in Professional Writing and Publishing from Emerson College, Cecilia believes some of the best training and experience to be a professional writer one can get is to be found in fanfiction communities.
Tan is the founder of Circlet Press, Inc., publishers of erotic science fiction and fantasy, and has edited over 100 anthologies of fiction, as well as the being author of many books, including the ground-breaking erotic sf/fantasy short story collections Black Feathers (HarperCollins) and White Flames (Running Press), and the Magic University series (Riverdale Avenue Books). Her short stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Strange Horizons, and tons of other places, and her work has earned her numerous awards and honors including RT Magazine’s Career Achievement award in 2015 and their prestigious Pioneer Award, and induction into the Saints & Sinners LGBT Writers Hall of Fame. Her upcoming series from Tor Books, The Vanished Chronicles, will be published Real Soon Now.
You can find her on twitter @ceciliatan.
K. Tempest Bradford is an award-winning teacher, media critic, and author of fantasy and science fiction steeped in Black Girl Magic. Her debut middle grade novel Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion will be out in September 2022 from FSG for Young Readers.
Tempest’s short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines, including In The Shadow of the Towers and Strange Horizons. Her media criticism and essays on diversity and representation have been published at NPR, io9, Ebony Magazine, and more.
She teaches classes and gives talks on representation and creating diverse narratives for Writing the Other and has been invited to teach at Clarion West, LitReactor, universities, and entertainment companies.
She’s the recipient of the 2020 LOCUS Special Award for Inclusivity and Representation Education and the 2022 Lemonade Award. She’s been nominated for FIYAH Magazine‘s IGNYTE Community and Ember Awards.
Registration
Registration for this event is free. If you cannot make the live event, please subscribe to our YouTube channel to get a notification when the recording goes live.
Accessibility
Zoom meetings software is compatible with standard screen readers and has several other accessibility features that make it possible for writers who are Blind or vision impaired to participate in the webinar. Closed captions will be available, auto-generated by Rev.com.
Technical Requirements
Zoom video conferencing works on computers, tablets, and most smartphones. We suggest you access the live webinar via a computer for the best experience. Before enrolling, make sure your computer or mobile device is compatible with Zoom. To do that, load the app on your system and join this test meeting. If you’re attending on a mobile device and need the closed caption feature, you must turn on this setting before joining the meeting.
Webcams and microphones are not necessary.
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