September 18, 2018
The Fictional Dream
with Lauran Strait
Chesapeake Bay Writers sponsored “The Fictional Dream,” a workshop geared toward helping writers hide the narrator. Lauran Strait conducted the workshop at the Yorktown Public Library at 7 PM. Hiding the narrator, whether in a first person story or a limited third one, greatly enhances reader engagement with the characters and is something all writers should learn how to do. When the narration is limited and hidden to the extent possible, the FICTIONAL DREAM will result. In this workshop, participants will learn what the fictional dream is, about its advantages, and how to achieve it. Hurricane Florence kept some folks away, but those who attended enjoyed the evening!
Lauran Strait, former writing instructor and workshop facilitator at the Adult Learning Center in Virginia Beach, is the founder and executive director of Hampton Roads Writers. She occasionally teaches writing workshops for HRW and the Muse Writers Center. She also works as a freelance book editor for a few select clients.
Her print and online work appears in Dog-eared, The Gator Springs Gazette, Atomic Petals, Retrozine, The Copperfield Review, A Woman of a Certain Age, Moondance Magazine, Monkey Bicycle, Insolent Rudder, LongStoryShort, Edifice Wrecked, The Virginian Pilot, Whistling Shade Literary Review, Somewhat.org, The Green Tricycle, Reading Divas, The Angler, Salome Magazine, Quiction, Bewildering Stories, Tiny Lights—a flash in the pan, Down in the Cellar, Tuesday Shorts, Six Sentences, and HeavyGlow. Some of her other fiction and creative nonfiction appears in anthologies such as Random House’s Knitlit the Third—We Spin More Yarns,Better Non Sequitur's See You Next Tuesday, and Smith Magazine’s Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak.