Beginning Date: Open enrollment
Duration: 12 weeks

Tuition: $295

 

Click the button to begin workshop activities. You must be registered to participate in the Characters Workshop. To register for this workshop, click the button.

Workshop Summary

The essence of fiction is the story of characters: who they are, what happens to them, what they do, and the resulting impact and outcome. As a general rule, fiction is one character's story. This is the point of view character, or POV, as it is referred to among writers and publishers.

In order for the story to be successful, the reader must care about the character and the problem the character faces. The more deeply felt within each of us and the more universal the problem is, the more likely it is to strike a strong resonant chord within the reader. This quality of resonance is what we are looking for in the character, in the problem, and in the story as a whole.

In order to maintain this resonance with the reader, the author must create credible, believable, sympathetic characters who carry the story forward to its conclusion. The concepts and procedures for doing that are the subject of this workshop.

There are exceptions and variations to the role of character and story just described, but we will stick with this one concept until we have mastered it and all of its nuances. Then we will look at variations.

Throughout this workshop and others in the writing program, we ask that you work with characters and stories from your own writing. We will examine famous examples and non-examples from other authors, but your development as a writer will come through the development of your own materials.