DC Writers' Salon Writing Lab: Breaking the Rules of Time in Fiction

Every fiction story is shaped by time passing—and controlling that time is one of a writer’s greatest superpowers. What happens when you stop treating time as a straight line and start bending, stretching, skipping, and breaking it?

This workshop invites you to have fun with storytelling time and experiment with the ways you can manipulate chronology, pacing, and sequence to create surprise and deepen emotional impact.

Together, we’ll explore how to:

• Tell stories backward, out of order, or in fragments
• Speed time up, slow it down, or make a moment stand still
• Shatter readers’ expectations about when and how a story unfolds

This is not a workshop about time travel. Instead, we’ll experiment with storytelling time—finding creative ways to shape the reader’s experience even when your characters are living in ordinary, linear time.

Come break the rules of time and discover new ways to make your stories more surprising, immersive, and emotionally resonant.

This workshop is led by DC Writers' Salon member, Tamar Shapiro. Tamar's debut novel, Restitution, was name a 2025 Foreword INDIES Award Winner, a 2026 IPPY Award Medalist, and one of the 49 Must-Read Books of Fall 2025 by Town and Country Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and a Washington Writers’ Publishing House anthology. She is a long-time resident of Washington, DC and has been a member of the DC Writers' Salon since 2021.

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Based in Dupont, the DC Writers' Salon is a studio and community for writers. The Salon helps us make space and time for what we love to do: write. But more than that, it invites us to engage with the otherwise solo, and sometimes grueling, process of writing in a way that's more connected and accountable. Learn more at DCWritersSalon.com.