Lon Otto

Lon Otto’s most recent book is The Flower Trade, a novel published last year by Brighthorse Books. He has three collections of stories—A Man in Trouble (Brighthorse Books), Cover Me (Coffee Hours Press), and A Nest of Hooks (U. of Iowa Press), winner of the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction, and the craft ebook Grit: Bringing Physical Reality into Imaginative Writing (Writers Workshop Press). His writing in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry is in many anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize, American Fiction, Flash Fiction and Flash Fiction Forward, Townships, and Not Normal, Illinois (Indiana U. Press), and in the craft text Best Words, Best Order (St. Martin’s Press). Several of his stories have been broadcast on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He has a Ph.D from Indiana University and is professor emeritus at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he taught literature and writing for many years.

Events

Lon Otto photo

Everyone Is Strange: Developing Characters in Fiction & Narrative Nonfiction

-
Scheduled
Lon Otto
Characterization—creating believable and interesting people on the page—is an essential part of successful fiction writing, and it is equally important in narrative nonfiction forms such as memoir and literary journalism. It is also one of the most complex elements of craft, with many different means of achieving it and quite a few ways in which it can fall short. In this weeklong workshop we will examine a variety of successfully realized characters in published fiction and narrative nonfiction, exploring how the authors managed to bring them so richly and intensely and memorably to life. We will place particular emphasis on discovering the uniqueness of characters, whether imagined or drawn directly from life, the individual’s “strangeness,” the distinctiveness that makes a person real to us as well as surprising.

Through daily writing exercises, some in which you can address excerpts from pieces already drafted and some drawing freshly on memory, observation, and imagination, you will generate and share new and significantly revised scenes that put into practice a wide range of characterization techniques, strengthening your command of those with which you are already familiar and experimenting with those you haven’t used before. This workshop is designed to be useful to writers with all levels of experience who have at least some fiction or narrative nonfiction writing in progress.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments, and provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.
Lon Otto photo

Writing in Layers: Fiction, Narrative Nonfiction, and Poetry

-
Scheduled
Lon Otto
One of the most effective ways of developing a story or poem or essay is to work in layers of different narrative or thematic material. When the layers come from different realms of experience or thought (personal experience, science, history, folk lore, work, religion, politics, food, art, etc.), or when they carry different emotional charges (comic, tragic, mysterious, mundane), they complicate each other in distinctive ways. Things get interesting that were maybe flat and predictable before, and the writing achieves depth, originality, and rich intensity. This workshop is focused on using techniques of layering to bring that kind of power and richness to your own writing.

Read more...
Lon Otto photo