In this four-week workshop, award-winning author David Corbett will guide you through an exploration of how to frame the conflict of a story through compelling, essential characters.
Your Instructor: David Corbett, author of 'The Devil's Redhead' and 'The Art of Character'
Where: Online — Available everywhere!
When: This class is not currently enrolling. To be notified when it is offered again, Click Here
Enrollment: 15 students
Price: $399
Class Description
Compelling conflicts are rooted in compelling characters.
And in this 4-week workshop, David Corbett, prize-winning author of The Art Of Character, will guide you through an exploration of how to frame the conflict in a story through compelling, essential characters.
The class will first explore the two crucial roles creating the “Unity of Opposites,” the core conflict at the heart of the story: the protagonist and the opponent. This exploration will include establishing the battle of moral visions driving the action—the premise and the counter-premise—as well as understanding the values the characters honor and the worlds they seek to create, defend, or maintain.
Next, students will learn how to develop those moral visions and worlds through the secondary characters, with specific attention to their dramatic roles and functions, with an eye toward establishing “Four-Corner Conflict” in order to create moral complexity and heightened suspense and dramatic tension.
Finally, the class will explore how to use structure to tighten and underscore the conflict created through the characters, with special attention to tackling specific story structure problems: the love story, the mystery, and stories lacking an opponent, among others.
This class includes:
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Four in-depth lectures from David
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Writing assignments to be critiqued by David and your fellow classmates
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Ongoing discussion and Q&A's
What This Class Covers
Week 1 — The Protagonist: The Moral Messenger
No story can move forward without understanding not just the protagonist’s outer goal but his inner/unconscious yearning, which establishes the stakes, determines his inner weakness, wound, or flaw, and predetermines the moral arc of the story
Week 2 — The Opponent: The Character of Conflict
To create a “Unity of Opposites,” you need an opponent with the desire, will, and power to destroy, deny, or claim for himself what the protagonist wants.
Week 3 — Supporting Characters: Creating a World
The protagonist and opponent do not act alone; they act on behalf of values they prize and worlds they cherish—values and worlds embodied in secondary characters who help create moral complexity and narrative richness.
Week 4 — Structure: The Scaffold of Story
Once your main and supporting characters are established, you need to find the best structural form for dramatizing the conflict to create tension and suspense as well as emotional impact.
Goals Of This Class
- How to identify the protagonist’s outer objective and inner yearning in order to establish the stakes; identify the character’s inner weakness, wound, or flaw; and recognize the moral arc of the story.
- How to distinguish between types of change in the protagonist—growth versus transformation—and what this means both in terms of character and structure.
- How to fashion the protagonist and opponent to maximize conflict and thematic richness.
- How to embody the premise in the protagonist and the counter-premise in the opponent.
- How to create compelling opponents who don’t fall into cliché, who honor the writer’s thematic intent, and who serve to enlarge the protagonist, thus enhancing the dramatic force of the story.
- How to create nuance and subtlety in the main characters, serve the hinge points of the plot, and bring to life the story world through the creation of compelling secondary characters.
- How to understand secondary characters with respect to the narrative functions they serve, without turning them into “plot puppets.”
- How to structure the story based on the core question asked of the protagonist.
- How to determine whether the protagonist faces an actual exterior opponent or instead faces a problem, an enigma, or a disaster—and how to craft the conflict if no opponent exists.
- How to structure stories where the conflict is not between adversaries per se, such as in the love story.
Additional Info
About Your Instructor
David Corbett is the award-winning author of the writing guides The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible” – Elizabeth Brundage) and The Compass of Character. He has published six novels, including The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, nominated for...
[more info]Testimonials and Acclaim
"The Character of Crime class with David Corbett was wonderful. Not only did I gain from identifying my protagonist and antagonist, it got me to take a closer look at the sub-plots of my story." —Kaley F., on a previous LitReactor course
"David's LitReactor class allowed me to learn a huge amount from an incredible teacher. I went into the class with a book I was ready to give up on and came out with a book with fully rounded characters and a solid structure that I feel confident I can finish using the knowledge David gave me." —Larry G.
From a recent class on writing characters hosted by UCLA Extension:
"David is extremely knowledgable, with an encyclopedic background in literature and film. He works hard on student critique and is committed to his class. Classmates were generous and supportive, led by David's approach to the online classroom. I've taken many writing classes through UCLAX and I found David's class to have been particularly eye opening and feel I've had a breakthrough by reading his lectures and paying close attention to his feedback."
"David... really challenged us to expand our characters, to take them apart and analyze their lifes. He provided valuable tools. The lectures he provided will continue to help me develop strong characters. He provided very insightful feedback very quickly."
"The topic of character development begins and ends with David Corbett’s The Art of Character. This is the book on the subject, destined to stand among the writings of John Gardner, Joseph Campbell, and the others of that select few whose work is fundamental to understanding the craft of storytelling." —Craig Clevenger, author of The Contortionist’s Handbook
"David Corbett has written a wise, inspiring love letter to all the imaginary creatures inside our minds—so we might conjure them whole on the page. I predict that massively underscored copies of The Art of Character will rest close at hand on writers’ desks for many years to come." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild
“Indispensable. Few are the writer’s guides that are written as beautifully, cogently, and intelligently as a well-wrought novel (or a well-rendered character) itself. This is one of those books.” —Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-Winning author of The End of Everything and Dare Me
"Corbett shares his secrets for making characters come to life on the page, from presenting their back stories and motivations to crafting memorable dialogue and great scenes that flesh out characters and move the plot forward at a compelling, tension-fueled pace. Corbett has a clear and elegant style that’s easy for would-be writers to absorb.” —The Writer Magazine, in selecting The Art of Character as one of the Top 13 Writing Guides of 2013
