Creating Mysterious Characters In Your Fiction

In this craft panel, Jayson Greene and Paula Bomer will discuss the art of creating characters whose motivations resist easy explanation. Why did they do that? Perhaps the characters themselves don't even know. Spending time with these fictional people can provide us with our deepest reading experiences, or they can make us throw the book on the floor. How do you inspire the kind of ambiguity that bewitches readers? Using examples from their own work as well as writers who inspire them, Bomer and Greene will discuss the delicate art of keeping readers at arms' length without pushing them away.

Jayson Greene is the author of the memoir Once More We Saw Stars and the novel UnWorld and a contributing writer and former senior editor at Pitchfork. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vulture, GQ, and elsewhere, and his music criticism has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Paula Bomer is the author of The Stalker, which was a Vogue’s Best Books of the Year, an NPR’s Best Thriller of the Year, A Publisher’s Weekly Editor’s Pick, a New York Magazine’s Best Novel of the Year, and called “a knockout novel” in The Guardian. She is the author of the novels Tante Eva and Nine Months, the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and Other Stories, and the essay collection Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in Fiction Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Full Stop, Volume 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana and has lived in Brooklyn for over 35 years.