Writing Workshops

Weekend Intensive: Bring Your Speculative Fiction to Life with Jayson Greene

$175

2 Sessions

Out of stock

Saturday & Sunday 3:00 pm EDT - 6:00 pm EDT March 7 to March 8, 2026

The Center for Fiction

This writing workshop is now sold out. Please email [email protected] to join the waitlist—and become a member for early access to future programming.

The best speculative fiction—writing that strains the boundaries of reality—slips you into strange new worlds so quickly and smoothly you don’t even notice the transition. In this weekend-long seminar and workshop, students will learn ways to accomplish this magic trick in their own work, analyzing passages from writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada, Kelly Link, and Jayson Greene for examples of subtle, whisper-quiet world-building and applying those techniques to generative exercises.

Over the course of a weekend, students will practice balancing the needs of world-building and narrative, tightening suspense without frustrating readers or subjecting them to cheap expository dialogue or clumsy info dumps. By the end of the weekend, students will feel a new intimacy with their self-created worlds, and their readers will, as well.

This course is ideal for the writer who has attempted writing speculative fiction before, but no prior writing experience is required. On both days of the weekend course, we will end with a short Q&A.

Course Outline:

Day 1: What To Reveal, When, and Why: We’ll consider the benefits and drawbacks of withholding knowledge from your readers: How much information about your world is too much, too soon? How far can you string readers along with hints and bread crumbs before they grow frustrated or confused? Analyzing passages from Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Jayson Greene’s UnWorld, we will explore different approaches to striking this balance. Then, students will undertake an in-class generative writing exercise and pair off to discuss their efforts. A short Q&A will close the class.
Day 2: How Do Your Characters Feel? — Seeking Intersection Points With Reality: In our daily lives, we mostly accept the nature of our world without comment, moving through our days with all their minor inconveniences and absurdities, all their unexpected joys and hidden despair. Usually, we’re so occupied with our own niggling problems that we rarely step back and comment on the nature of our reality. In this session, we’ll map our characters’ concerns and worries and look for “intersection points”—moments where our characters’ muddled interior monologue makes direct contact with the nature of their world, thus offering a speculative fiction author the chance to shed light on crucial differences between their created world and our own. Analyzing passages from Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over The Earth as well as short stories from Puloma Ghosh and Kelly Link, students will then undertake a generative writing exercise and pair off to discuss their efforts. A short Q&A will close the class.

Level: Introductory

This course is held in person at The Center for Fiction.

Led by

Jayson Greene

Jayson Greene

Jayson Greene is the author of the memoir Once More We Saw Stars (Knopf, 2019) and the novel UnWorld (Knopf, 2025) and a contributing writer and former senior editor at Pitchfork. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vulture, and GQ, among other places. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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