Deepening Your Characters with Gretchen Shirm

This seminar will explore how to delve deeper into character, through nuance, sensation and feeling.

This seminar is designed for students who have a manuscript, but who are struggling to create nuanced characters. It helps students to learn techniques for thinking more deeply about their characters’ personalities, and how they are written on the page. Across two hours, this seminar helps students find ways to create psychological and emotional nuance. Students will learn how to better create fully formed, sensate characters. It will provide students with a range of instruction, exercises and focused tasks, concentrating on developing characters they are already working with. At the conclusion of this seminar, students will have developed techniques to form believable, complex and even contradictory characters that create interest and intrigue for readers.

Learning outcomes

As part of this workshop, participants will learn more about how to:

• Create interesting and engaging characters
• Think more deeply about characters and their motivations
• Understanding how to create characters that serve your story
• Develop rich, complex, emotionally nuanced fiction

Format

This is an online seminar with a focus on craft; it will be hosted via Zoom. As part of the Adaptable 2023/24 program, this workshop is designed for writers emerging and established but is suitable for writers of all levels and writing backgrounds. A 7-day replay will be made available to participants.  

Complimentary access to this workshop is available to all Adaptable 2023/24 applicants - please select the free Applicant Admission ticket type. Other Queensland Writers Centre members and the public may attend with a paid ticket.

About Gretchen

Gretchen Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room. Her fiction has been published in Griffith Review, Overland, Meanjin, Best Australian Stories amongst other places. Her criticism is regularly published in major national newspapers.

For more information about Queensland Writers Centre’s Program of Events and answers to FAQs, please visit: www.queenslandwriters.org.au/program-info