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Identifying the Heart of Your Fiction

The Deep Themes & Emotional Landscapes in Your Stories

What recurring themes, images, and emotional terrains shape your fiction?

Every writer has a world they return to—a collection of emotions, memories, images, and obsessions that shape the stories they tell. This workshop helps writers identify and build that world, so that they can return to it again and again with depth and clarity, and so they can write the stories only they can relay.

Drawing from writers like Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Elena Ferrante, we’ll explore how fiction writing often grows from the same emotional soil of our personal histories and our curiosities. Guided by writing examples and tangible strategies, writers will complete a series of timed writing sprints (5, 10, and 15 minutes). Whether you're writing a collection or just need inspiration to generate individual work, all are welcome.

Participants will leave with:

• A clearer sense of their personal “world” — the recurring themes, images, and emotional terrains that shape their voice.
• Strategies for returning to this world when they feel stuck. 
• New generative writing they can develop beyond the workshop.

Nardine Taleb is a writer and editor based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has been published in The Offing, the Rumpus, and Electric Literature. Her poetry chapbook "warda" was published September 2023. She frequently teaches workshops at Literary Cleveland and is working on a few short stories.