Show Me How You Feel, with Jacqueline Sheehan
Emotions are the key to crafting compelling characters. But what if your character can’t express his or her feelings? Skilled writers must learn how to capture, on the page, emotional nuances that the characters themselves aren’t even aware of. The good news is that there are multiple ways to reveal emotions that your characters don’t know they’re feeling. In this workshop, writers will experiment with nonverbal indications of emotion. Through exercises and examples, we’ll learn to move beyond the smile or frown to more subtle, specific and telling character details. We’ll also explore using physical aspects of a scene—setting detail, gesture, movement—to amplify our characters’ feelings, as though they are actors on a stage.
Saturday, November 7, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
Jacqueline Sheehan, PhD is the New York Times bestselling author of The Comet’s Tale, Lost & Found, Now & Then, Picture This, The Center of the World, and The Tiger in the House. She writes NPR commentaries, travel articles, and essays including the New York Times column, “Modern Love.” She edited the anthology, Women Writing in Prison. Jacqueline teaches workshops at Grub Street in Boston and around the world. Find out more at http://www.jacquelinesheehan.com/.
