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Beautiful, Flawed, and Troubled: Creating Memorable Characters with Carter Sickels
February 6, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
$350WHAT: A four-week generative online collaboration
WHEN: Begins Saturday, February 6th, 2021. This class is hosted on our rich interactive online platform, WetInk. The class is broken into four weeks, and within those weeks you go at your own pace. Optional Zoom “happy hours” and a final Zoom class reading may be scheduled at a later date.
ACCESS: $350. Payment plans always available—contact Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com
SCHOLARSHIPS: Scholarships are available, please click here to apply.
The most memorable characters in fiction are the most human, motivated by desires and regrets, and deeply shaped by places, people, and memories. In this creative incubator, we’ll explore how to develop complex characters with emotional depth. How does desire inform the mystery of a character? How do characters think and act, talk and love, in mundane and profound ways? What motivates them, what do they feel? How do socio-economic, cultural, and geographical backgrounds shape them? What about gender identity, sexuality, bodies? Dreams, myths, wounds? What do they resist, what hurts them, and how do they see themselves in the world?
We’ll explore how to reveal our characters to be complex, messy, contradictory human beings, capable of change. You’ll learn to write characters who are not flat or vague or generic, who break through clichés and stereotypes, as we examine how attentive listening can bring us closer to our characters—who also may surprise and confound us. Together we’ll study the techniques of other writers, and there will be generative exercises to light up your creativity, sparking new material or nourishing existing projects.
Week One: Desires & Vulnerabilities
Week Two: Empathy & Writing Difference
Week Three: Places & Emotional Landscapes
Week Four: Relationships & Tensions
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub City Press), a Kirkus Best Book of 2020, Finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury) was a 2013 Oregon Book Award finalist, a Triangle Publishing Award finalist, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing appears in various publications, including The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, Joyland, and Catapult. Carter has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.