How to responsibly craft scenes you or your protagonist didn’t witness, don’t fully remember, or can only speculate about—with clarity, honesty, and emotional truth.

Fiction & Nonfiction

First-person POV in both memoir and fiction demands emotional truth, but what happens when the main character simply doesn’t—or can’t—know what happened, but the story still demands that certain information come through? In this craft-centered session, we’ll explore techniques for threading in offstage action, family history, hidden truths, and essential context—without breaking the voice or cheating the form. 

Memoirists may need old family stories, information from people they’re estranged from or are deceased, or cultural context from before their birth.

Novelists know that first-person fiction is intimate and immediate—but your narrator can’t be everywhere, can’t know everything, and might be naive, biased, or flat-out wrong. 

Whether due to absence, memory gaps, or lost connections, writers often face the challenge of telling stories that hinge on scenes the main character never witnessed or the memoirist can no longer verify. 

This special 2-hour webinar explores how to use informed imagination and clearly signaled speculation to bring in offstage information and uncover hidden truths without misleading your reader or losing consistency in POV. We’ll explore writing the unknown using speculation, research, deduction, mysticism & faith. Through discussion, examples from published work, and a guided writing exercise, we’ll learn how to responsibly fill in the blanks—and consider when doing so serves the memoir or novel and when it doesn’t.

This is a TWO-HOUR class, with 20 minutes of writing time in the middle. 

• 40 minutes – Learn five types of perhapsing, see them in published work, and understand why and how to create scenes and montages outside the protagonist’s direct experience.
• 10 minutes – Q&A to fully understand and apply the information.
• 20 minutes – Revise a scene to include perhapsing, or write a few speculative paragraphs from scratch. Allison will continue taking questions in the chat. OPTIONAL: volunteer for live-editing and upload your scene as a Word doc or docx to a Google Drive.
• 40 minutes – Allison will live-edit pages shared on screen, noting where the writer is succeeding in the purpose of the scene, and what revisions she suggests to make the prose even more effective. During live edits, she’ll call out specific techniques and tips for everyone to apply to their own work, right away. 
• 10 minutes – Q&A and planning your writing from here.

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In this webinar, you will:

• EXPLORE the challenges of uncertain or secondhand scenes, backstory, subtext and offstage action in first-person prose.
• DEFINE emotional truth in fiction and the ethics of invention in nonfiction.
• DEEPEN your narrative authority by signaling speculation on the page with language and structure.
• WRITE a speculative or secondhand scene using clear signals to the reader.
• DISCOVER what’s working with live-editing of volunteer pages and tips for everyone.

This workshop suits memoirists and novelists at all levels who want to use ethical imagination as a craft skill, not a shortcut.

You’ll receive the slides and prompts to take this work into your manuscript

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

Allison K Williams is the author of Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book. She’s helped writers sell to Big Five and literary publishers, hit the NYT Bestseller list, and sign multi-book deals. She’s guided essayists and humorists to publication in media including the New Yorker, Time, the Guardian, the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Refinery29, Hippocampus, the Belladonna and TED Talks. As Social Media Editor for Brevity, she inspires thousands of writers with weekly blogs on craft and the writing life.

Allison works with literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction, and is familiar with the conventions of most genres. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and spent 20 years as a circus aerialist and acrobat before writing and editing full-time.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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