Alaska Writers Guild  Second Seminar on Writing
with Porfessor Lee Goodman

Professor Lee Goodman will be presenting the second Continuing Education Program. The instructor, Lee Goodman, holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College, and he studied fiction in the graduate writing program at Boston University. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review and Orion Magazine. His novel Cliff Nesting is in production at the University of Alaska Press. He has taught at the University of Alaska Anchorage, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska Pacific University, and he was the visiting writer at the Interlochen Academy for the Arts.

Subject:  Character

Where: YWCA 324 East 5th Ave.

When:   Saturday, March 13-10:00 am to 1:00 pm
             Saturday, March 20-10:00 am to 1:00 pm

Cost: $60 Members.
          $75 Non Members

Members or Non Members

Members Price $60.00 Non Members Price $75.00

For Additional Info and to Enroll, call David Brown  907-301-0799 or Lee Goodman 522-0590

Maximum size of class will be 30.

"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head and…as you get older, you become more skillful in casting them."
Gore Vidal

A writing teacher of mine once put it to me this way: “Character, character, character,” he said.  And he was right.  Stories are about their characters: Every writer knows this, though it’s a truth we can lose sight of in the painstaking work of trying to construct and deliver a well-written story.  Good characters can rescue a faltering plot, while bad ones will sink an otherwise brilliant plot. 

But where do they come from, these quirky, brilliant, stupid, irascible, contemptuous, loveable and unpredictable offspring of our muses?  And how do we fill their souls with the breath of human passion and complexity?  How do we make them believable and interesting? 

The answers to these questions are different of course for every writer, for every character, and for every story.  But the mere asking of the questions gets us part way to the answers.

The first class of the seminar will be a wide-ranging discussion of what goes into conceiving of and rendering compelling characters.  We’ll discuss examples from literature, looking at how different writers have approached the challenge of constructing fully dimensional beings from the simple building blocks of words.  There will be homework, and exercises.  The second class will be spent discussing the results and the problems encountered and the revelations and the breakthroughs.  It’ll be fun and invigorating, and by the end of the second day we should all have a burgeoning cast of players demanding their turns on the page.