Interiority: A Heart-Pounding, Breathtaking Workshop lef by Amber Wheeler Bacon

When it comes to writing fiction, Kurt Vonnegut said to “Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” Got it. We can do that. But as we do, it can become difficult to show readers how characters think and feel about all of these awful things happening in their lives. In first drafts, “thoughts” and “feelings” can often be written involving the heart and lungs, focused on heartbeats, breathing rhythms and all sorts of skipping, palpitating, throbbing, panting, catching and swallowing.

In this class, we’ll work on engaging with a character’s thoughts and feelings in ways that move beyond these cliches, using specificity and deepening character. This will be a generative workshop. Using your own characters and their harrowing situations, we’ll look at, discuss and practice Rebecca Makkai’s four techniques to writing interiority: Action, Thought, Specific Physical Interiority and Tangential Thought. Come to this workshop ready to write, and maybe laugh at some of the ridiculous clichés we’ve all leaned on in the past.

This interactive writers workshop will be held as an online video conference call through Zoom. 

Details for joining the video call will be provided to all participating writers after registering.

Thursday, July 20, 6:00-8:00 p.m. on Zoom. Limited to 15 participants. (A minimum of five participants is needed for this workshop.) $45/person. 

https://patconroyliterarycenter.eventbrite.com

About our instructor: Amber Wheeler Bacon is a writer, editor and teacher whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Ecotone, Epiphany, Five Points, New Ohio Review, Post Road, Prairie Schooner and Witness. You can find her writing online at Ploughshares and CRAFT. She is the recipient of the 2018 Breakout Writers Prize sponsored by The Author’s Guild and a 2021 scholarship from Bread Loaf Environmental. In 2020, her story collection was a finalist for Hub City Press’s C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize and Moon City Press’s Short Fiction Award. She received the 2022 Lit/South Award for flash fiction. She was a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Janus Prize, nominated by Ecotone. Amber has an MFA from Bennington College, teaches at Coastal Carolina University and lives by the beach in South Carolina.