Without emotional characters, you are just writing events, not replicating real people who illustrate aspects of the human condition. Your characters should certainly have external problems, but they should also have internal conflicts.

In order to do that, you must be honest about your own emotional reactions to personally challenging moments and want your characters to have that same range of feelings, resisting the impulse to make the characters sentimental or melodramatic. Your life-changing moments will be the inspiration for stories readers crave.

This class will help you identify those moments, ones ideal for fiction or nonfiction, and then help you recognize your complicated reactions in order to transfer those emotions to your characters. We will practice focusing on craft elements (illustrating emotions through actions and sensory perceptions) in order to transform difficult material—the embarrassing, the forbidden, the emotionally difficult–into scenes that honestly expose life.