Tin House Live : Rebecca Makkai on The Ear of the Story

Given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, Rebecca Makkai’s craft talk “You Talkin’ to Me?: The ‘Ear’ of the Story” looks at an important but underappreciated aspect of story craft, the flip side of point of view, the point of telling. In her words, “Who is the story’s implied listener? Are you casting your listeners as people who already know this world or people who need to be filled in? And what are the political and artistic implications of glossing a culture or setting for readers who don’t know it?”