Course Agenda:

In this workshop participants will work with mythic narrative and emotional arcs to create characters that we can recognize as real people, not two-dimensional cut-outs.

Participants will learn through practical exercises how to make compelling characters that live on in the reader’s mind long after they have put down their books.

Suitable for: Writers of short fiction, novellas and novels.

Bring along: Bring along a piece of writing where you have begun to develop a character.  500 words max.

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Our characters have emotional lives too, and we often overlook the depth and complexity of these lives to the detriment of our writing.

These characters with which writers are destined to spend considerable time – sometimes years in the case of a novel – need to be more than simply a name.

In her novel, Unless, Carol Shields commented that characters ‘need to be supplied with a childhood of some sort, with parents at the very least, sometimes even grandparents.’  Characters need this genealogy, but they must also have an emotional consistency and development that makes them believable human beings – and this applies to both saint and psychopath!

To book or for further information visit www.ballaratwriters.com