Narrativity offers a single track of programming, so ideas can carry through from one panel to the next and the conversation continues all weekend — and our panels are participatory events, so the audience is as much a part of the conversation as the panelists. Panels run from 11:00 am Friday through about 6:00 pm Sunday. In the evenings, we’ll have all the function space available for music, conversations, games, or other activities that take your fancy. If you’d like to organize something specific, let us know!

Welcome to programming planning for Narrativity 2026: Six Impossible Things! Luckily, NOTHING is impossible, at least according to that one door. We have, thanks to the feedback from so many of you, determined this year’s panels! And at the same time, you all have made next year’s work even harder by putting forward some really excellent ideas for future panels. I love/hate you all.

Here they are, the full descriptions of the eleven impossible discussions we’ll be having this year. Please note that panel descriptions are meant as a jumping off point for our panelists and con members. Sometimes you all take a topic or idea in a much more interesting direction than even occurred to me. -Erin Shanendoah

Worldbuilding

• “Wax-works weren’t made to be looked at for nothing, nohow” – Does a penny buy your lunch, a piece of candy, or is it worthless? Do interstellar banks manage credit across the universe, or does your main character have to barter wolf-pelts for a new sword? Whether you care about economics or not, cash, credit, or trade is an integral piece of how your characters navigate their world. How do you use your monetary system – from what is called down to the physical (or lack thereof) manifestation – to build versimilitude in your world?

… Solves Everything

• “…a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags it’s tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.” – You’ve taken yourself, or rather your characters, to a spot where too many options exist, and you don’t know how to choose which way to go from here. Or you have ended up at a place that you never expected to get to. Will your readers follow you on that journey? Bring us your questions about how to get a character from here to there, and we’ll tell you how signalling your reader solves everything.

Tools

• “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” – Humans have been telling each other stories for about as long as humanity has exsted. Before written language, before even pictures drawn on a cave wall, we have told our stories. There is something powerful in the human voice, something special about the way we tell stories that are meant to be listened to instead of read, that must live on in a mind without a written record. How do we use those tools to make our written stories more powerful?
• “I was just giving myself some good advice” – Narrativity is an amazing community, but sometimes we all want to hide away from the world and just work on our writing. What do we do when we’re in that mountain cabin with only a bubbling brook to talk to and we get stuck? How do we ask ourselves the right questions, generate solutions, and get yourself unstuck when discord is down, and you don’t have anyone else to bounce ideas off of?

Craft

• “If you believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” – Trust is essential for an author. Both your characters and your readers have to be able to trust you to tell the story, even when they don’t trust each other. And while we probably can’t help get your characters to trust you (that really is a you problem), lets talk about what we can do as authors to earn the readers’ trust. How do we convice them to stick around long enough to prove that they made the right choice in trusting us?
• “Who’s been painting my roses red?” – Not worldbuilding but building your world. How do you help your readers experience the world the way your characters do? How do you keep them from arguing with you about coconut trees in Africa? Let’s talk about how we make your setting real.

The Author

• “Well, I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat!” – Forgetting the author self-insert character (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), is it possible for the author – their thoughts, feelings, politics – to be too present in a work?

The Reader

• “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” – We all need feedback to make our writing better. And when we’re in a community of writers, we all need to be able to give quality feedback to other writers. How do we do that?

The Characters

• “How do you like the queen?” – Writing unsympathetic protagonists? How far will you go? Serial killers, cannibals, actual demons. What are the perils — and pleasures — of writing a character that some would consider beyond the pale? Where do you draw the line between pushing boundaries and pushing away your audience?

Meta

• “In that direction lives a Hatter, and in that direction lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.” – Some Narrativitists find a long stretch of open highway tremendously relaxing and stimulating to the creative brain. Others may look to a busy coffeeshop for their storytelling stimulus, while still others may long for that classic garret or isolated cabin. How does where you are affect what you write, and what role does getting away from it all play? Let’s also talk about how the space you live in affects mood and creativity: Is a clean, uncluttered desk the sign of a sick mind, or is mess and chaos the mind-killer?
• “Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'” – Is Star Wars really a fantasy story spanning planets instead of contries? Was FireFly really a western set in space? Was Alien really a horror story with aliens? Is science fiction just set dressing on another kind of story? Or does science fiction contain something that make it uniquely science fiction and not just setting and props?

Have your own idea for a panel next year? Want to be a panelist? Please contact our Paragon of Programming, Erin Shanendoah, and let her know what you’re interested in.