Parties, meetings, funerals, and weddings. Well populated scenes are some of the most rewarding, and notoriously difficult, to write. Not only can social gatherings allow us to depict wider cultures and histories without resorting to pages of passive summary, they can also energize plots and add intrigue. But how many characters are too many, and how does one introduce groups of disparate characters without overwhelming or confusing the reader?
In this workshop, we will examine a few rich examples from literature and discuss ways to handle the potential chaos. If there is time, we will apply these strategies to the opening of a scene of our own.
Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review “New and Noteworthy Selection.”
Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, the Guild Literary Complex named her one of 30 Writers to Watch. She lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.
