Indulge your fictional half with Brit Bennett, author of New York Times bestselling novel The Vanishing Half.
“Writing can feel like such a lonely venture, so having community is so important and having spaces like this where people can come together and share their work and talk about writing is really cool. Thank you to Girls Write Now for inviting me to host this salon; I had a lot of fun!” – Brit Bennett
What to Expect
- Unearth your fictional identity
- Ground your writing in character
“You don’t need to take the reader’s hand. If you take that leap, they’ll follow you.”
— Brit Bennett
Prompt #1
Sometimes we fantasize about escaping our lives and becoming someone else. If you were to vanish, and become your fictional half—the shadow you, your evil twin, your better half, etc!—where would you go, and what would you leave behind? Give yourself a new name and write a few sentences in the third person about leaving.
Prompt #2
Based on what you wrote for the first prompt, write the scene in which your fictional identity has been uncovered and your secret has been exposed. Who exposes you and what is their relationship to you?
Brit Bennett
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review and Jezebel.