Fascination and Fiction: How to Build Mystery into Your Writing

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 class 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.

About the teacher:

Jessica Alexander has taught creative writing workshops at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Franklin and Marshall College, Porchlight Literary Arts Center, The Fairweather Project, and The Iowa Summer Writing Festival, among other places. Her novella, None of This Is an Invitation (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) was published by Astrophil Press in summer 2023. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest. Her collaborative memoir (co-written with Vi Khi Nao) That Woman Could Be You came out with BlazeVox in April 2022. Her novel, Agnes, We’re Not Murderers is forthcoming from Clash Books in 2026.

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