The art and craft of fiction II. Writing character. Who and why?

We’ll begin with the apparently simple question: what is a character? What makes a character more than a description of what they are wearing, or more than a collection of mannerisms or prejudices, or, even, more than they may claim to be? We’ll discuss the appeal of particular fictional characters and analyse how writers have earned this empathy from the reader. We’ll discover that convincing characters are not uniformly consistent, that they share with real people contradictions, unexpected sympathies and dislikes, and that ‘real’-seeming characters are believable and interesting because they are imperfect.

We’ll look at the character’s journey and how this may form the spine of a story, considering how a character may drive the development of a story but also how they show what they’re made of when story ‘happens’ to them. We’ll learn how characters tell us who they are by how they interact with other characters and we’ll come to appreciate the supreme importance of dialogue in this chemistry. We’ll learn how characters not only make plot – in that they make things happen – but they remake it in their interpretation of events.

Through writing exercises and workshops we’ll test our ideas and strategies, honing our existing skills and discovering new ones, through experimentation and discovery, in a supportive and creative atmosphere. Finally we’ll understand that we can create characters who are believable and interesting to readers only when they’re believable and interesting to us as writers.