Show Me How You Feel

$45.00 – $90.00

The fees from ABC’s adult writing workshops subsidize our free writing programs for kids, whose work is collected in a yearly anthology, and pay our adult workshop instructors. A limited number of seats in each class are reserved for scholarships, which cover 100% of tuition-fees and are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. All are welcome, and we especially encourage BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ writers to apply.

Emotions are the key to crafting compelling characters. But what if your character can’t express his or her feelings? Skilled writers must learn how to capture, on the page, emotional nuances that the characters themselves aren’t even aware of. The good news is that there are multiple ways to reveal emotions that your characters don’t know they’re feeling. In this workshop, writers will experiment with nonverbal indications of emotion. Through exercises and examples, we’ll learn to move beyond the smile or frown to more subtle, specific and telling character details. We’ll also explore using physical aspects of a scene—using movement—to amplify our characters’ feelings, as though they are actors on a stage.

This Austin Bat Cave adult writing workshop is open to writers of all levels and is limited to 30 students.