Family Stories: Evoking Emotion in your Characters - a writing workshop

401 South Railroad Street,Lexington NC 27292

16 August, 2021

Description

Join teacher and award-winning author Susan Zurenda for this hands-on and engaging workshop that will inspire writers of family histories. We tell our family stories for ourselves, for our future generations, and for others outside our family. These stories connect the past to our present and to the future. Our stories and what we learn from them honors and respects our ancestors and us. They can awaken us and future generations to our potential. They can be transformative. For our family stories to be effective, however, they must not only tell a tale but express the important values, blunders, wishes, hopes, disappointments, and triumphs common to all humanity. And to convey the truth of humanity, our characters must express real emotion. Writing honestly about family can be more challenging than recalling events accurately or finding the arc of our own story. How fair is it to put people into our books—names, warts, and all? Only the writer can answer the question of how much to whitewash stories, but if you can’t write honestly, your story will be wrong and it will be thin. We are all human and flawed. And we are moved and transformed by our humanity. This workshop will cover both the basics of story and the importance of genuine emotion in stories. It will concentrate on how writers achieve success in creating human emotion in contrast to why writers sometimes fail in this essential endeavor. Ample illustrations will be provided, some from the Susan’s novel, Bells for Eli, and participants will be given writing prompts with feedback. After teaching literature, composition, and creative writing to thousands of high school and college students for 33 years, Susan turned her attention to putting a novel in her heart on paper, the genesis of which started with a short story that won a fiction prize some years ago. She was delighted to present her debut novel, Bells for Eli, to readers on March 2, 2020. During her years of teaching at Spartanburg Community College and then as an AP English teacher at Spartanburg High School, Susan published short stories and won numerous regional awards such as the South Carolina Fiction Prize (twice), the Porter Fleming Competition, The Southern Writers Symposium Emerging Writers Fiction Contest, The Hub City Hardegree Contest in Fiction, Alabama Conclave First Novel Chapter Contest, and The Jubilee Writing Competition (twice). Since 2018, she has published six stories in literary magazines. Attendees will receive a copy of Bells for Eli as well a beverage of their choice.