Workshop: Fiction

This workshop is FULL. To be added to the waitlist, please email taryn@mainewriters.org.

Creating People Out of 26 Letters: Writing Characters

Fiction with Kate Christensen

The most memorable stories have protagonists who feel as complex and alive and vulnerable, as maddeningly blind yet integrally palpable as ourselves, characters we remember long after we finish the book—the way we remember people we know. In this workshop, we’ll focus on the development and deepening of the fictional characters in your own novel-in-progress or short story. We’ll discuss related craft techniques such as voice, point of view, dialogue, interiority, and agency. Please bring up to 5,000 words of your work-in-progress to share. Our aim will be for you to get to know your own characters better and understand how to bring them more fully to life, in the most essential and mysterious sense of connection to your reader—fulfilling the implicit promise of all beloved novels.

SUBMIT

After registering, participants in the fiction workshop are asked to submit a manuscript of up to 5,000-words by no later than 9:00 a.m. on April 21. Manuscripts may be complete short stories or excerpts from novels. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to taryn@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “CHRISTENSEN BLACK FLY MSS.”  *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF..

Kate Christensen is the author of seven novels, including The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and most recently The Last Cruise, as well as two food-centric memoirs, Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose, which won the 2016 Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her shorter pieces have appeared in many publications including Tin House, the Baffler, Down East, Portland Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Bookforum, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Food and Wine, as well as many anthologies. She lives in Portland, Maine with her husband and their two dogs. She is currently at work on a new novel, The Change.