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

All fiction is fundamentally about time passing, and controlling time is every author’s superpower. This workshop is for writers who want to have fun with their superpower.

Can we:

• Tell our stories backwards or in fragments?
• Speed time up, slow it down, or make it stop altogether?
• Shatter the expectations of time?

Note: this is not a workshop about time travel! Instead, we will experiment with storytelling time even when our characters are living “normal” time.

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.