Arvon at Home Masterclass: Fundamentals of Character with A. L. Kennedy
Your prose can be full of incident, yet still uninvolving. You may find yourself peppering sentences with adjectives and adverbs to create an impact you don’t quite reach because something is missing. Quite often that ‘something’ is a clear sense of at least one character and their point of view.
When your characters are fully formed, they help drive
your plot and give you emotionally involving scenes. It takes work to create
them, but there’s no need to despair.
We can return to all the fun we had
pretending to be people and even things when we were kids. We can harness the
immense creativity we display while we’re asleep, or daydreaming. We can all
make characters, and putting in effort to build them can give your reader one
of the greatest gifts they can receive – the magic of being someone they’re not
for a while. In times like these, it really is a gift.
So let’s talk about that
and try out some techniques together.
AL Kennedy is the author of 21 books: nine novels, six
short story collections, three works of non-fiction and three books for
children. She has won a variety of UK and international book awards, including
a Lannan Award, the Costa Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize, the Somerset Maugham
Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Date: Thursday July 2nd 2020, 11:00am – 13:00pm BST
Location: Online
Cost: £35 There are limited number of grants available for people on low-income. These are allocated on a first come first served basis. Please contact communications@arvon.org to apply.
Further details and to book here