Class

How Character Happens (a Character-Building Workshop)

This course explores character-building through a collaborative, generative process designed to help writers create more surprising, psychologically complex fictional people. Rather than beginning with biography questionnaires or abstract backstory prompts, we will build a character together by accumulating seemingly arbitrary elements, both superficial and deeply persona, and then asking how those details might connect. The goal is not randomness for its own sake, but discovery: learning how disparate traits can begin to suggest a coherent inner life, a history, a set of desires, and a pattern of behavior.

Class time will be spent primarily in guided discussion, generative exercises, and close collaborative analysis. Together, we will turn isolated facts into meaningful psychological relationships, exploring how character emerges through tension, inconsistency, suppression, association, and desire. We will also consider how character is revealed on the page through action, voice, gesture, and selection of detail.

Once we have our character, we will begin to discuss how to build a story premise around that character in a way that promises a compelling narrative.

This course is best suited to fiction writers who want new strategies for developing characters that feel less predetermined and more alive, particular, and dramatically fertile.