"Making Your Story Seem Real" with Stephanie Noll

When we read good fiction, we are entering a dream, a place where we can spend our time with characters that we long to love, hate, identify with, feel for. You can tell when a story isn’t working; the dream is disrupted, and as readers we may say, “There’s no way that would happen,” or, “That’s not how people talk.” As writers, even if the worlds we create are made up and full of people we’ve never truly met, we want to transport our readers to a place that feels entirely “real.”

This class will look at novel and short story excerpts where characters and dialogue help to create a believable narrative. We’ll examine how the writers of selected works create characters that are complicated and layered, and we’ll talk about how dialogue is so much more than a conversation between characters. We’ll complete writing exercises that give us the opportunity to create characters and dialogue for new or existing work.

(Note: Writers of speculative and science fiction, have no fear—this workshop is for you, too! Making a story seem “real” is not the same as making it seem “realistic.”)