UNCONVENTIONAL CHARACTERS: Mayberry, Fluffy, and Aunt Mildred’s Hat - This three-week workshop will get deep and dirty into ways to turn elements of your story into “characters” to enrich your novels and reveal things about your heroes and heroines. Your book’s settings, your characters’ pet(s), inanimate objects of importance, even important memories—all can be enhanced to play a role in your character development, plot advancement, and story richness. Along the way, we’ll also look at continuity, pacing, and visual tricks to help us keep track of our unconventional characters to make sure they’re not being overused. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to become worldbuilders, architects, fashion designers, and timekeepers! Lessons will include: Why setting and description are important; the difference between them; examples of good and not-so-good; the functions setting and description should be playing in your novels. Worldbuilding: Fantasy-based. Worldbuilding: Reality-based. When to Show and When to Tell. House Hunters and Character Building. Fashion Sense, Trash Talk, and Character Building. The Description Toolkit, Part 1: Mapmaking 101. The Description Toolkit, Part 2: Writing Tools. Putting it All Together: The Plot Map. Putting It All Together: Setting as Character
June 1-29, 2020
Workshop Title: Unconventional Characters
Instructor: Suzanne Johnson
June 1-29
Price: $30 ($25 for HCRW members)
Workshop description:
UNCONVENTIONAL CHARACTERS: Mayberry, Fluffy, and Aunt Mildred’s Hat - This three-week workshop will get deep and dirty into ways to turn elements of your story into “characters” to enrich your novels and reveal things about your heroes and heroines. Your book’s settings, your characters’ pet(s), inanimate objects of importance, even important memories—all can be enhanced to play a role in your character development, plot advancement, and story richness. Along the way, we’ll also look at continuity, pacing, and visual tricks to help us keep track of our unconventional characters to make sure they’re not being overused. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to become worldbuilders, architects, fashion designers, and timekeepers!
Lessons will include: Why setting and description are important; the difference between them; examples of good and not-so-good; the functions setting and description should be playing in your novels. Worldbuilding: Fantasy-based. Worldbuilding: Reality-based. When to Show and When to Tell.
House Hunters and Character Building. Fashion Sense, Trash Talk, and Character Building. The Description Toolkit, Part 1: Mapmaking 101. The Description Toolkit, Part 2: Writing Tools. Putting it All Together: The Plot Map. Putting It All Together: Setting as Character
About the instructor:
Suzanne Johnson was happily ensconced in New Orleans as a university magazine editor and veteran copyeditor when Hurricane Katrina sent her adopted hometown underwater. She took her Katrina experiences, added wizards and magic (and the sexy undead pirate Jean Lafitte), and began what has become the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series published by Tor Books. Writing under the name Susannah Sandlin, she also writes award-winning paranormal romance, including the popular Penton Legacy series for Montlake Romance, and romantic suspense and thrillers, including two series, The Collectors and Wilds of the Bayou, also for Montlake. She was the founding copyeditor for Entangled Publishing, leaving when her own writing career needed more TLC. Suzanne grew up in Alabama halfway between the Bear Bryant Museum and Elvis’s birthplace and lived in New Orleans for fifteen years, so she has a highly refined sense of the absurd and an ingrained love of college football and fried gator on a stick. She currently lives in Auburn, Alabama, where she is a full-time author and does copyediting work for other authors both as a freelancer and on Reedsy.com