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Thurber House - Creating Authentic Characters

with author Lisa Lopez Snyder

A hands-on writing workshop with Thurber House for writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoirs. Learn and apply several techniques to help make the characters in our storytelling authentic.

Whether we write fiction or creative nonfiction, we want our characters to stand out (and if you’re writing a memoir, yes, the people in your lives are characters). In this session we’ll learn and apply several techniques to help make the characters in our storytelling authentic, be they fierce and messy or curious and quiet. We’ll read short excerpts from fiction and memoir—and we’ll study those techniques to generate our own writing. We’ll look at ways that dialogue, sensory descriptions and pacing can keep our characters captivating. By workshop’s end, you’ll have drafted scenes to get you started, as well as receive tips on how to keep writing — and revising.

Instructor: Lisa Lopez Snyder

Instructor bio: Lisa Lopez Snyder is an essayist and short story writer. Her pieces have been featured in 34th Parallel, Adelaide, The Raleigh Review, The Summerset Review, The Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and other publications. Her essay, “In Transit,” won The Chattahoochee Review’s 2011 Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction and she was named the 2015 Carl Sandburg Writer-in-Residence. She received her MFA in creative writing at the University of South Carolina and went on to teach first-year writing at Dartmouth College. She is currently working on a memoir-in-essays about being a paper girl in Huber Heights, Ohio.

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