Please join me at School One in Providence (220 University Avenue, Providence, RI 02906) for a seminar class I’m teaching for GrubStreet: Providence on Monday, October 28, from 6 to 9 p.m.

The class description:

Getting Emotional: How to Layer Your Character's Feelings

Have you ever struggled trying to portray your characters’ emotions? How someone experiences and expresses emotion often has complex individual, social, and cultural undertones. Much of the way people show their emotions is non-verbal. Therefore, capturing nuanced feelings on paper can be a daunting task.

In this seminar, we will start by examining and identifying different degrees of emotions. A character can be many levels of angry—irritated, aggravated, pissed off—and as writers, we must be able to pinpoint exactly what she is feeling at that moment in the story. We’ll look at some non-verbal indicators of emotion, moving beyond the smile and the frown to more subtle but effective details, keeping in mind differences due to age, culture, conflict, and other factors. We’ll wrap up the class by exploring our written environments, identifying ways we can use the physical aspects of a scene to amplify our characters’ feelings, as though they were actors on a stage. All of our investigations will be accompanied by in-class writing exercises to experiment, discover, and deepen our understanding of craft when it comes to writing emotions.

Scholarships are available.

For more information, please visit this site: https://grubstreet.org/programs/providence-class/

Hope to see some familiar faces there!