Interiority: Writing Craft Workshop

Whether we’re inventing characters in fiction or conveying the workings of our own minds and hearts as non-fiction narrators, we’re able to know both the external and internal worlds of the people we’re writing about. In short, we can know our characters completely, which is something we can never do in real life. (In real life, of course, the question is whether or not we’d want to.) But as writers, this opportunity comes with the challenge of deciding how much of the interior landscape to explicitly reveal, or implicitly suggest, or not reveal at all.

Whatever our choice, it’s this continuous tension — the compelling complements, the messy contradictions — between the internal and external worlds that we can take story-telling advantage of. We’ll be discussing examples of all three degrees – complete access in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady; selective access in Toni Morrison’s Sula; and no access whatsoever in Ernest Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River”. We’ll also discuss a passage from a non-fiction essay of my own. What’s unique to each example will be the core of our discussion. As for what they have in common, it’s beautifully described by the novelist and story writer, Alice Mattison. “The genius of narrative is not just to describe interior states but to embody them – to find an equivalent for them in the visible world.”

Douglas Bauer’s most recent novel, The Beckoning World, was a Must Read selection of the Massachusetts Library Association and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is the author of three previous novels —Dexterity; The Very Air and The Book of Famous Iowans — and three works of non-fiction — Prairie City Iowa: Three Seasons at Home; The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, which won the PEN/New England Award in Non-Fiction. He is also the editor of the anthologies, Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. His numerous essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Book Review, Agni, Cutleaf, and other publications. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative non-fiction. He lives in Cambridge, MA.

Host or Publisher Westport Writers' Workshop