WHEN Thursday, June 1, 6:45-9:45 p.m.   WHO This seminar works well for all levels of fiction writers, memoirists, playwrights, screenwriters, and writers of creative non-fiction. WHERE offices of mediabistro.com West Hollywood, Calif. 310-659-5668 EARLY BIRD SPECIAL Seminar price goes up $10 seven days before the start date, so register soon. PRICE $55 ($40 for ) more info

Course Details

It's an axiom that plot comes from character, but beyond the axiom, most classes do not get at how this is so.

In this follow-up to Jeff Bens' Creating Compelling Characters, prose, dramatic, and screen writers apply the principles from that class to a series of in-class exercises as well as to samples from their own in-progress work. Further, the class builds on the principles from that seminar, introducing new techniques that help writers look deeply at the audience-hooking tension between a protagonist's surface and internal stories. In this seminar, we explore ways to create and sustain this compelling tension.

Participants will:

• Review the concepts introduced in Creating Compelling Characters,
• Examine character and story in terms of point of view, diction, structure (sentence, paragraph, scene, sequence, story), internals, visuals, and actions
• Explore how screenwriters can learn from fiction, and fiction, and non-fiction writers from film

Instructor Bio

Jeff Bens's Courses

Jeff Bens is the author Albert, Himself and has just finished a story collection, In a Dream, A Girl Meets a Boy. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The Oxford American, The Sun, New England Review, New York Stories, Arts and Letters, Tiferet, Kestrel, Inkwell, Vignette, and in anthologies from Milkweed Editions and Avisson Books.

Jeff directs the creative writing program at Manhattanville College and teaches fiction, narrative, and screenwriting. He is contributing editor for the national literary magazine Inkwell. He was also a founding faculty member of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and his short documentary film, Fatman's, has been screened in festivals around the world and on NC-PBS.