Writing Tips: Writing the Intimate Perspectives of Characters

This Writing Tips class will focus on writing in the first person from the perspective of a character with hardships or an illness. The first-person narrative will enable writers to fully understand and express the impact the hardship has on a character's motivations. Consider Marie Laure in Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See or Lennie in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. 

The class will visit the Library’s Lightburn Gallery for inspiration from the current exhibit of Torrance York: Semaphore, A Journey Through Parkinson's.  York has had to accept her diagnosis, and her photography now richly expresses a new perspective that reflects her hopes, challenges, and aspirations.  We will explore her work to gain an understanding of how a character may view their challenges.

Midway through class we will write from prompts, resulting in a 500-words-or-less flash piece.  Writers may take the work home to polish for submission into an end of summer anthology.

A wine & cheese reception follows in September, with writers and their guests, the exhibiting artist, and the public to celebrate the anthology and its intersection of writing and art.   

Writers of all levels are welcome.