Beyond Villains and Heroes: Creating Complicated Characters with Mary Cantrell

Discover the importance of complexity in character development in fiction. Come prepared to share your favorite characters from fiction — books, movies, and/or TV — with the goal of identifying common features of good characters, one of which is complexity. We’ll look at Robin Hemley’s essay, “Sympathy for the Devil: What to Do About Difficult Characters.” With that advice in mind, participants will respond to one of several prompts, all of which ask them to write from the viewpoint of a character whose beliefs differ from their own. Time permitting, participants can share their scenes andor discuss the challenges of writing difficult characters. Participants will leave the workshop with an appreciation for what Hemley argues in his essay: “If we as writers understand our characters, even the unlikeable ones, if we understand their motivations and convey this understanding to the reader, then perhaps we will come to understand something more about the mysteries of human behavior and aspiration, not the givens we already grasp, not the people and borders we know well.

Class meets online, Saturday, September 27, 1 – 3 pm Central time.

Class size: Minimum 5, maximum 20.

Member discount: Members of Write On receive a 10% discount on all classes and workshops. To become a member, please click here. To receive the discount, members must log in to the website using their unique password and enter member10 in the promotion code box. The code is case sensitive.

Teaching Artist: Mary Cantrell is a professor of English at Tulsa Community College. Her creative work has been published in Big Muddy, among others. Her academic publications include “Teaching and Evaluation: Why Bother?” in The Authority Project: Poweer and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, “Theories of Creativity and Creative Writing Pedagogy,” co-authored with Anna Leahy and Mary Swander in The Handbook of Creative Writing, and “Assessment as Empowerment: Grading Entry-Level Creative Writing” in Teaching Creative Writing. She also contributed to the article “Diggers in the Garden: The Habits of Mind of Creative Writers in Basic Writing Classrooms,” published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College.