Conflict Through Character: The Bottom-Up Approach with Jacinda Townsend

9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

4-Day Workshop

Are your characters falling flat? Has your plot soured and curdled? This workshop proposes the cure: conflict through character, or the bottom-up approach. While many writers start with an idea of a plot or even a theme, this workshop starts with the proposition that when we let our characters do what they will, we end up with conflicts that soar, plots that dazzle. We will visit with your old characters and your new ones: all you need to bring are their thoughts and voices, a pen and paper (or a laptop), and your creative willingness.

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction and was the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jacinda grew up in Southcentral Kentucky, leaving at age 16 for Harvard, where she took her first creative writing class. Prior to attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she worked as a broadcast journalist and lawyer in New York. Since receiving her M.F.A. she has been a Fulbright fellow and has taught at universities throughout the Midwest. She recently finished a novel called Kif and is a mom to two beautiful children who amaze her daily.