Desire in Fiction with Brit Bennett

3-Day Workshops
Wednesday – Friday, May 3 – 5 | 2:30 – 5:30 p.m.

Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water.” In its simplest form, a story is just that: a character who wants something and faces obstacles to getting it. But many stories flag under characters whose desires are muddled or boring or weak. How do we create desires that are powerful enough to drive the story forward and reveal character? In this workshop, we will examine desire in published stories as well as student-submitted work and discover new ways to create characters whose desires are convincing, specific, and compelling.

Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.