QWF Workshop – Love and Intimacy in Fiction: Setting the Scene

“One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.”
– Alice Munro

All levels are welcome. Limited to 12 participants.

Are your characters stuck at first base? Maybe you’ve been trying for months to create tasteful romantic tension, but your revisions seem to be getting tawdrier instead. Love and sex in fiction are challenging to write: We’re striving to find the perfect chemistry between voice, language, pacing, plot, and setting, and the measurement of each is never the same from one situation to the next. Just as it takes time in real life for intimacy to grow between people, it takes more than a few lines in a short story or pages in a novel to develop genuine narrative intimacy.

This workshop will provide participants with creative and technical tools to write anything from smoldering eye contact between strangers on a subway to harrowing mid-novel breakup sex between critical characters. We’ll look at a variety of print and digital media, and everyone will be encouraged to act as a reader as well as a writer—that is, to share ideas and offer constructive feedback. Participants will leave the workshop with an expanded, specialized lexicon and the confidence to know when to be nuanced in their writing and when to be explicit.

This workshop is not a genre “how-to” for romance or erotica, but a fun, holistic survey of tools and techniques writers can use to craft believable and compelling intimacy in any fictional context.