Welcome to Narrativity!

Registration is coming soon for:

Narrativity 2025: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

Just what is “good writing” anyway? Is that much-maligned opening line really a nice bit of scene-setting? And who turned out the lights?

All these questions and more will be answered, or at least enthusiastically debated, at Narrativity 2025: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, June 26-29, 2025. Come and shine a flashlight on the darkest recesses of the rules — they can’t hide for long with this crowd!

  • Our Thursday Workshop will kick things off on June 26. Details are still in the works, but when sign-ups are open, they’ll be here.
  • Thursday evening, join us for fun, games, and food in the ConSuite, and get to know the folks you’ll be spending the weekend with. Last year’s charcuterie was a thing of beauty and a culinary delight; what will this year bring? Only one way to find out — be there!
  • Friday, June 27, through Sunday, June 29, you can plunge into panels. Learn cool things! Share ideas and opinions! Whether you’re new to Narrativity or an old hand, we want to decant your brain hear what you’ve got to say. Our single track of programming lets each panel build on the ones before, so the whole weekend becomes a conversation that everyone’s a part of.

We are penciled in at the lovely Crowne Plaza Minneapolis West, 3131 Campus Drive, Plymouth, MN 55441.

Membership: Registration isn’t open quite yet, but memberships will start at just $42. If you want to be on the mailing list for next year, just let us know.

2025’s Covid policy will be posted Real Soon Now.

Our con suite will offer snacks, drinks, light sandwich fixings, and the like. For more substantial sustenance, the Crowne Plaza has several dining options, and there is a wide variety of restaurants within a ten-mile radius.

Got some extra time before or after the convention? Minneapolis has many nifty things to do.

Questions? If they aren’t answered on this website, please feel free to Contact us!

 

What is Narrativity?

Take a concentrated, advanced-level conversation about the art and craft of storytelling. Expand it to include 50-100 smart, accomplished, engaged people. Add in a bunch of silly jokes and some really good food. Bake for a weekend (what can we say, it’s Minneapolis in the summer), and presto! you’ve got Narrativity!

Narrativity is designed for an intermediate- to advanced-level audience: folks who’ve been at this storytelling game for a while now, who know their way around the basics but are always looking to expand their skills and learn from other experienced practitioners. (Beginners are very welcome, however, as long as you don’t mind being thrown into the deep end!) So if you’ve been wishing for something beyond the 101-level discussion to be found at many conventions, Narrativity might just be what you’ve been looking for!

Narrativity is a participatory event; the audience is as much a part of the conversation as the panelists. While you can sit quietly and just soak it all in, if you’ve got good ideas to share, we want to hear them!

At Narrativity, our primary focus is on fantasy and science fiction in written form, but we love a good story regardless of genre or format. We want to talk with smart people about how to write good things well. We want to explore all aspects of storytelling, from concepts to word choices, from what to put in to what to leave out — and what effects each of those decisions can have on the completed work. We want to discover new ways of talking about that complicated, half-seen process that occurs when somebody says “Wouldn’t it be cool if….” We want to share ideas with people who do things differently, who have different perspectives and come from different starting places, because we firmly believe that a free and friendly exchange of ideas makes all of us richer.

And while Narrativity could be called a “writing convention”, it isn’t just for writers! Readers are an important part of the discussion; after all, it doesn’t matter how good the writing is if nobody’s reading it. A story exists in a strange blended universe built from the reader’s imagination as well as the writer’s, and we want input from all sides of the process. When we talk about how we write, we’re also talking about how we read, and how a story goes from a vague tickle inside one person’s brain to a plethora of fully-fledged universes (all different, all fascinating) inside many brains.

We love spirited discussions, and digging deep into challenging subjects, and bad jokes, and good friends (including the ones we haven’t met yet). If that sounds like your idea of a great way to spend a weekend, then you want to be at Narrativity!

Want a virtual taste of what the con is like? Try our Free Samples!