by Writing Workshops Staff
4 hours ago
In the Armenian household where Aida Zilelian grew up, family dysfunction was something you did not name out loud. Years later, after publishing a novel about that kind of family, she found other writers coming to her with the same quiet question: how do you write about the people who raised you without betraying them? Her answer reframes the whole problem. Instead of writing around reality, she says, write what you actually mean to write.
That conviction is the beating heart of The Family Fight: Turning Conflict Into Story, a one-day Zoom seminar Zilelian is teaching on Saturday, August 8, 2026 through WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. Zilelian is the author of the novels The Legacy of Lost Things, winner of the Tololyan Prize, and All the Ways We Lied, and she has told stories everywhere from PBS's Stories from the Stage to the TEDx stage.
In two focused hours, you will learn to wield dialogue as the primary engine of a scene, using it to carry not just conflict but plot and the hidden layers of character. You will generate three to five story concepts drawn from the family relationships you know best, and you will practice skipping exposition to drop readers straight into the charged moment. Bring the fight. Leave with the pages.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Aida:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Aida. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Aida Zilelian: I'm a writer and storyteller as well as an educator in NYC classrooms. I recently gave my first TEDx Talk about my experiences teaching storytelling. I'm excited about completing two new collections of work - my short story collection 'Where There Can Be No Breath At All' and my first full-length poetry collection 'Beautiful Monster (and other lost orphans)'.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Aida Zilelian: My response is not going be based on craft here, but content. After my novel was released, writers reached out to me about how they could navigate around writing about their family without crossing boundaries. Many of them were interested in writing fiction and borrowing from their real lives.
Coming from an immigrant Armenian household, where talking about family dysfunction was taboo, I wish someone had told me to write about it as much as I had to. To write what I mean to write instead of writing around reality.
"To write what I mean to write instead of writing around reality."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Aida Zilelian: I'd love my students to understand the value of writing what you want to write and using dialogue to communicate not just conflict, but plot and hidden layers of elements such as characterization and character dynamics.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Aida Zilelian: 'You are loved,' someone said. Take that and eat it. - from "Sinners Welcome" by Mary Karr
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.
Aida Zilelian: Moments of pause. Where are moments in a story where the pacing needs pause? Pause for tension, for the reader to consider the moment, to create an element of surprise.
Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Aida Zilelian: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
When I was writing my last novel All the Ways We Lied there were moments where I grew bored of my writing on a sentence level. The Goldfinch was on my desk the entire time I wrote. I would turn to it to remind myself what beautiful, fresh language looked liked. Though my book was not written in the first person, the narrator in The Goldfinch writes confessionally and candidly in a way that helped me navigate my characters and their internal and external dialogue.
Aida writes toward the confessional, character-revealing dialogue she admires in her favorite novels. In The Family Fight, you will spend real time on the page building exactly that kind of charged exchange.
Enroll in The Family Fight →Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Aida Zilelian: What I have heard time again that creates pressure for most writers is, 'Write every day'. Instead, I plan ahead. I look at the week ahead and ask myself the most realistic times I can write. And sometimes if nothing comes, I use that time to revise work, read literary journals who have an open call, submit my writing. If I'm not actually writing, I'm committing that time to anything related to writing.
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Aida Zilelian: Most writing classes won't tell you this, but you don't have to start at the beginning of your story. You can start at the part or moment you are most excited to write.
"You don't have to start at the beginning of your story. You can start at the part or moment you are most excited to write."
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Aida Zilelian: Sylvia Plath. Although I have been writing prose much longer than poetry, my first genre of writing was poems. When I realized I wanted to write poems in Plath's style, I knew I was a writer. She is one of the only poets whose work I memorized and can still recite.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Aida Zilelian: Open and supportive with clear direction.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Aida Zilelian: My students would be surprised to learn that I play guitar and piano, and that I played solor shows in downtown NYC for nearly a decade. For the release of my novel All the Ways We Lied, I composed music on the piano and it is the mini soundtrack for my book.
There is something fitting about a novelist who scores her own books on the piano teaching a class about tension and release, because that is what a family story is: a piece of music built from silences and sudden crescendos. In one Saturday afternoon, Zilelian will help you find the charged moments in your own history and turn them into scenes that crackle with subtext. If the stories you have been circling are the ones about the people closest to you, this is your invitation to finally write them down.
Betrayal, tough love, secrets, regrets: every family carries them, and every family is a story waiting to be written. Save your seat and start yours this August.
Save Your Seat in The Family Fight →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
