Collo Event: Creative Writing Festival

On April 10, 2018, I attended a presentation at the Creative Writing Festival, which was held in the Reece Museum here at ETSU. The session I attended was the Fiction Writing Workshop with Mark Powell. Powell spoke on fiction writing and how to be a successful fiction writer. One of the points that he made that shocked me was that fiction writers cannot explicitly tell the reader how they should be feeling. The writer can't say "This is very sad." Fiction writers must evoke feelings in the reader by the tone they set in their writing. Writers must allow readers to experience the story as the characters do, so that the readers must figure out their emotions like the characters do. Powell talked about how a writer's real life influences and shows through their fiction works. I guess I had experienced how fiction stories can evoke emotions and get readers attached to the characters, but I had never thought about how writers achieve this connection between reader and story. This workshop was very interesting to me and very informational. I do not have an interest in being a writer and I'm not a very good one when I do write. However, this workshop was helpful to me and I believe it will make my writing better in the future. I was not looking forward to attending this workshop before I did, but I am very glad that I attended and got a better view about how writers are successful through their works.