Whether two characters spend five pages in a bar or a cast of hundreds fills your trilogy: who are they and why are they in your story? How can the reader tell them apart, remember them, grasp their relationships to each other, and understand the parts they play in forming a coherent story? Do you need them all? Who can be combined or lopped? What helps make them distinct? Whose history matters? In this workshop we’ll look at techniques to help you assess and articulate your characters, looking at order of appearance, entrances and exits, major and minor characters, definition of characters in relation to and contrast with each other, and the shifting alliances and tensions between them. Above all, we’ll look at what they do, as the web of their actions and reactions build a strong, memorable story.
Lynne Barrett's third story collection Magpies received the Florida Book Awards fiction gold medal. Her handbook What Editors Want guides writers through the submissions process, and she’s editor of the nonfiction anthology Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do (and Don’t... Read More →
Sunday May 7, 2017 11:30am - 12:45pm EDT
Tremont Room