Narrativity 2024: Romancing the Muse
Do you coax your muse with candy and candlelight? Are you ready to strangle your muse, the contrary so-and-so? Or maybe you don’t have a muse at all, and your story-generating process is something entirely different. Come and debate the finer points of inspiration, perspiration, and metaphor at Narrativity 2024: Romancing the Muse, May 30 through June 2, 2024 — wine, roses, and/or garottes optional.
- Thursday, May 30, our Writing Workshop returns! We’re still finalizing the details, but while we’re polishing, you can see what last year’s looked like here.
- Thursday evening, join us for the Sugar and Charcuterie Extravaganza, and get to know the folks you’ll be sharing the weekend with while consuming a cornucopia of comestibles. Party games, board games, and quiet corners for conversation will all be available, so whichever your inclination, there should be your version of fun to be had!
- Friday, May 31, through Sunday, June 2, you can plunge into panels. Learn cool things! Share ideas and opinions! 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 will once again be at the lovely Crowne Plaza Minneapolis West, 3131 Campus Drive, Plymouth, MN 55441.
Membership: Memberships are just $42 through February 2, 2024, $55 from February 3 through May 10, and $75 from May 11 and at the door. Click here to get yours!
Please note that proof of vaccination against Covid-19, ***including booster shot*** will be REQUIRED for admittance to Narrativity 2024. Read the full Covid policy here.
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!