The Plenary Review

WOW!  Women on Writing is offering summer workshops for writers looking to earn more income and/or hone their craft. WOW! offers tons of information, including advice, tips, blogs and other tools to help aspiring and current women writers, editors, agents and publishers.

From WOW!:

How the courses work:All of the courses operate online—whether through email, website, chat room, or listserv, depending on the instructor’s preferences—and are taught one-on-one with the instructor. The flexibility of the platform allows students to complete assignments on their own time and work at their own pace in the comfort of their own home. It’s a wonderful experience and an excellent way to further develop your skills, or to try your hand at something completely new!

The featured courses are:

Poetic Passion: Image, Story, Line And Language (Starts July 3) 

How To Get The Right Agent For Your Manuscript (Starts July 27)

Get Paid To Write: Become a Freelance Writer (Starts August 10)

Publish That Book: How To Write A Nonfiction Book Proposal That Sells (Sept. 7)

An Introduction To The Craft of Screenwriting (Ongoing)

Creating a Character Sketch (Ongoing)

Course tuition starts at $100 and varies depending on topic. All of these workshops sound promising, but I’m particularly interested in “Creating A Character Sketch.”

Anyone that knows me (or will go through edits with me) knows how deeply I feel about back story and character development. After attending Screenwriting Expo a few years ago, and reading Robert McKee’s Story, I do character sketches for all major and even some minor, but pivotal, characters.

For me, character sketching involves giving life to my character. I literally take the character from birth to my story – regardless of whether they’re 10 or 62 – in a free flow exercise that sort of becomes its own story. For example, through character sketching, I develop such things as: the character’s hometown, where they now live and how they got there; detailed physical appearance (and related issues, such as health or self-perception struggles); family history and current family status; favorites (colors, foods, hobbies, music, etc.);  strengths and weaknesses; education and career goals and missteps; personality; life goals and regrets; significant relationships; influences; major life moments; and so on.

Through this exercise, I also do research and minor back story or sketches on key characters that have impacted my character in some way. If you’ve ever played The Sims (my favorite game), you have a general sense of what I’m talking about. But in a nutshell, my character sketching involves taking my character from birth and filling in all of life’s details, moments and changes leading up to my story.

Is this exercise tedious? You betcha. And, it often leads to a lot of back story for my character. Things that won’t make it into the manuscript, but give me perspective and insight into the person that I’ve created and his or her motivations. 

To write the character, I have to understand the character. And, I’ve found that through character sketching, I usually begin with the physical surface and end up delving into the psychological, long before I actually sit down to write the story.