Writing Smaller with Halle Hill

Effective fiction thrives on selective and significant details. Details in fiction are often inspired by glimmers from our everyday lives. The odds and ends we collect create what Eudora Welty calls, “Continuous threads of revelation” which can be harnessed to create strong, voice assured work.

In this workshop, we will practice writing smaller, using our memories, observations, obsessions, and lore to weave irresistible atmospheres. We will read 4 brief examples, and then dive into a generative “seeing” exercise, pulling together our unique experiences and discussing techniques to leverage observation for longer projects. Additionally, we work together to identify the difference between an interesting detail vs. an essential detail. 

As we clear the way for our intention, hopefully we will catch what’s ours out of the mystery. Like Annie Dillard says, “Something is moving through the air and headed your way.” Please bring a pen and notebook.

Halle Hill is from East Tennessee and lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. A graduate of Maryville College and the M.F.A. Writing program at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), she is the winner of the 2021 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize and was a finalist for the 2021 ASME Award for Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Joyland, New Limestone Review, Southwest Review, and The Oxford American, where she won the 2020 Debut Fiction Prize.