Creating Vivid Characters with Ellen Birkett Morris
Creating Vivid Characters with Ellen Birkett Morris
Tuesday March 21st
5:30-7:30PM Phoenix MST
This seminar will look at what makes a character memorable by examining excerpts of popular works. Students will use prompts to begin to build a character. Then they will use writing exercises to explore how character is tied to motivation (desire) and helps drive plot (action). We’ll talk about how to deepen characters by having them imbued with conflicting desires, values and actions. You will leave with a workable sketch, and a better sense of how a fully drawn character enriches a story. This class is for emerging writers who want to make their stories more vivid, memorable and powerful.
About the instructor
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, stories about female strength and resilience, winner of the Pencraft Award and finalist for the Clara Johnson Award. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council. Ellen is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks, and Lost Girls, an award-winning short story collection. Her poetry has appeared in The Clackamas Literary Review, Juked, Gastronomica, and Inscape, among other journals. Morris won top prize in the 2008 Binnacle Ultra-Short Edition and was a finalist for the 2019 and 2020 Rita Dove Poetry Prize. Her poem “Abide” was featured on NPR’s A Way with Words. Her essays have appeared in AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader magazine, and on National Public Radio.
You can learn more about Ellen at her website https://ellenbirkettmorris.ink/
and on social media at
https://www.instagram.com/ellenbirkettmorris/
https://twitter.com/birkett_morris.
Ellen holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University-Charlotte.
Thank you for your interest in Creating Vivid Characters with Ellen Birkett Morris.