Welcome to Narrativity!

Registration is coming soon for:

Narrativity 2027: Trust Your Demon

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous, or brilliant – you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

Trust your demon.”

― Roger Zelazny

Join us July 22-25, 2027, at our new hotel, the Comfort Inn Plymouth-Minneapolis.

Registration is coming soon. Make sure you’re on our mailing list, and subscribe to updates to get all the latest news!

Our con suite will offer snacks, drinks, light sandwich fixings, and the like. For more substantial sustenance, there’s the Lucky 13 steakhouse right in the hotel, Perkins right next door, and 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?

Steven Brust at panelist table, Miska the Visla peeking out underneath.
Steven Brust and Miska at Narrativity 2023. Photo by Peggy M.

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 is 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!