Please join us September 21 to hear Blake Kimzey speaking on Character IS Action.
Who are your favorite characters from books, TV, and film? Why do you love them above all other characters you’ve encountered on the page, stage, and screen? The characters we love are characters we care deeply about. We want them to survive the story, to win the heart of their beloved, to conquer and vanquish their foes, real and imagined. Above all we want them to get what they want.
To fully understand our favorite characters–and to fall in love with them as readers–we have to know what they want, what will happen if they don’t get it, and why now. As writers it is our job to make our readers care for our protagonists, for the balance that has been upset in the story to be restored by the time we get to THE END. To write compelling characters we need to give them agency, to move them to action, to feel like the story is driven by them instead of happening to them. We’ll discuss how to write more compelling characters in this seminar and you’ll leave with a better understanding of who your characters are, what they want, what will happen if they don’t get, and who you want them to be on the page as true one-of-ones.
~*~*~
Blake Kimzey founded and directs Writing Workshops Dallas. Named one of D Magazine’s Artists to Learn From, he is a graduate of the MFA Program at UC Irvine; Blake also sits on the Board of the Elizabeth George Foundation and received a generous Emerging Writer Grant from the Foundation in 2013. His fiction has been broadcast on NPR, performed on stage in Los Angeles, and published by Tin House, McSweeney’s, Vice/Terraform, Redivider, D Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Short Fiction, FiveChapters, The Lifted Brow, Hobart, Puerto del Sol, The Los Angeles Review, The Masters Review, Booth, Faultline, FLAUNT Magazine, Malibu Magazine, Day One, PANK, Fiction Southeast, Surreal South ’13, and selected by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2015. Blake’s collection of short tales, Families Among Us, an Indie Bestseller, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2014. He recently completed his first novel and is working on his second. Blake has been awarded fellowships to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center. He is proudly represented by Ryan Harbage at The Fischer-Harbage Agency. Blake has also taught creative writing at UC-Irvine and the University of Texas at Dallas. Follow him on Twitter @BlakeKimzey, find him online at blakekimzey.com, or contact him at blake@writingworkshopsdallas.com.
