Kelly Dwyer

Developing Dynamic Characters: Live ISWF Class Over Zoom

I'm teaching a new live class over Zoom the last weekend of April through the University of Iowa

IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL

Come write with me!

xo Kelly

Lonely picture of me by myself on Zoom. Keep me company, please!

Developing Dynamic Characters (Weekend Workshop)

Kelly Dwyer, Instructor

Dates/Time: Friday, April 28–Sunday, April 30, 2023

Introductory Meeting and Overview, Friday on Zoom:

7:00–8:00 p.m. Iowa/Central Time
8:00–9:00 p.m. Eastern Time
5:00–6:00 p.m. Pacific Time
6:00–7:00 p.m. Mountain Time

Workshop Meetings, Saturday & Sunday on Zoom:

11:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Iowa/Central Time
12:00–5:00 p.m. Eastern Time
9:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. Pacific Time
10:00 a.m.–3:00 a.m. Mountain Time

Saturday and Sunday meetings include a one-hour break. Class meets for four hours each day.

*International students should get in touch with Kelly if you would like to take the workshop but cannot make Friday night’s intro session. kelldwyer@yahoo.com

Course Description

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Toni Morrison’s Sula. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Richard Wright’s Invisible Man. Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett. Jade Chang’s Charles Wang. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Junot Diaz’s Oscar Wao. Steigg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. Jeanette Winterson’s Jeanette. Malinda Lo’s Ash. Murakami’s Oshima. …

Dynamic characters. We may love them, hate them, or love to hate them, but by the end of the novels or memoirs in which they star, we feel like we know them better than we know our friends or family—and maybe even ourselves. They’re filled with contradictions, and yet they feel real. They linger long after we’ve finished their stories. And they change, going through a transformation that carries the plot of their books. How do we go about creating and developing such complex, memorable, and dynamic characters ourselves?

In this weekend workshop, we’ll discuss how to create memorable characters, and how to deepen characters we may already be working wit h. We’ll discuss how character relates to plot, and how, in creating a character arc, we’re also creating a plot outline that will help us map out (or revise) our stories, novels, or memoirs.

The weekend workshop will include lectures, discussions, exercises, and assignments, which writers will be encouraged to share on a volunteer basis. The workshop is for writers of all levels, from beginners who are just starting out, to intermediate authors who are in the process of revision, to advanced authors who may have already completed a book (or two or three) …

Writers are free to “bring” a character they’re already working with or to create a new one from scratch. The exercises and assignments will be adapted to your needs either way. This is a mostly generative workshop in which we will be working on new material, but writers are free to revise material if they prefer.

Writers will leave the workshop with an understanding of what makes a dynamic character, and will have already begun to write or revise a complex, memorable, and dynamic character themselves.

Instructor

Kelly Dwyer's third novel, Ghost Mother, will be published by Union Square & Company in Fall 2024. Kelly taught in the University of Wisconsin system for fifteen years and has taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for over twenty years. Whether in person or online, Kelly is passionate about helping other writers achieve success. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Oberlin College, Kelly grew up in San Pedro, California, and now divides her time between Madison, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. Kelly also writes flash fiction and plays, which have been performed in Boston, New York, and Glasgow. Feel free to visit http://www.kellydwyerauthor.com/.

Registration & Fees

The fee for this course is $350. Payment in full is required to register.

Registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Class size is limited to 10.

Note: Your credit card payment will be processed by an external provider and will appear on your credit card statement as “UI Writing—Magid Center.”

Refund & Cancellation Policy

If you need to cancel your enrollment, please let us know as soon as possible. We can only offer full refunds if you cancel one week prior to the start of class. After that, before the start-date of class, we can offer a 50% refund. We cannot refund day-of cancellations, and we cannot refund or partially refund registration fees once the class has begun.

Terms & Community Policy

1. The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a program for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to enroll in Festival workshops.

2. The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a community built on an assumption of shared enterprise, in the spirit of mutual respect. We reserve the right to a) revoke the registration of or b) dismiss from the program any person who disrupts the learning/working environment of others. Participants in the Festival are subject to all University of Iowa policies governing conduct in our community, whether online or in person.

Questions?

Contact the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: iswfestival@uiowa.edu. Phone: (319) 335-4160.

Our tiny staff is out and about. If you phone and we miss you, please leave a detailed message!

If you have any questions for me, the instructor, please contact me at kelldwyer@yahoo.com

We hope to see you over Zoom in April!

I'm delighted to share the news that my novel GHOST MOTHER will be published by Union Square & Co., the imprint of Barnes and Noble, in 2024.

"Author of THE TRACKS OF ANGELS and SELF-PORTRAIT WITH GHOSTS, Kelly Dwyer's GHOST MOTHER, part psychological ghost story, part murder mystery, part character study, in which a young woman falls in love with a decrepit mansion, only to discover that her dreams house was the site of a gruesome triple murder/suicide in the 1950s, and she begins to experience strange occurrences that lead her to believe the house is haunted; but are her experiences of the ghost real, or is this a cascading mental breakdown? To Claire Wachtel at Union Square 7 Co. by Henry Dunow and Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner."

I've been working on this book for many years, so if you're a writer, the moral is, keep writing! And if you're a reader, I hope to connect with you again next year and you'll let me know what you think...

In the meantime, I'm wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year!

(photo of lights and moon in San Pedro, CA, my hometown)

BOOK LOVERS by Emily Henry was one of the many GoodReads Choice Award winners (and nominees) that I read and enjoyed this year. It's about books, book lovers, and love, and it's also laugh-out-loud funny...

What are some of the favorite books you read this year? Please share in the comments, so I can add to my (ever-growing) reading list (and buy a few holiday gifts for myself), :) and feel free to connect with me on Goodreads!

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/823802.Kelly_Dwyer

(from @TheGoodwillLibrarian)

When the leaves turn gold and red, the air feels crisp and smells like wet leaves, the temperature drops to the 50s, and pumpkins and mums appear on porches, my thoughts turn to scary books and films.

I love watching my favorite creepy movies, and I love re-reading and discovering new shiver-inducing books. A few recent discoveries these past few weeks have been Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak, about a young nanny, recently sober, who comes to live with a family with a five year-old child. When he starts drawing dark, disturbing pictures, the nanny, unsure of what she's seeing, begins to investigate an old murder. Fervor by Alma Hatsu combines Japanese monster stories with the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II, as well as a Zombie-like illness. Ray Russell's Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories contain some gothic stories that seem as though they could have been written during any time period, even though these were mostly written in the '70s. My favorite is the tale of how a man came to acquire a permanent disturbing grin on his face.

I'm a fast reader, and these were page-turners. If there's a ghost haunting me, standing behind me, reading slowly, I'm afraid I disappointed them, for I was turning these pages as fast as I could to make sure the characters got out alive....

What about you? Read any good (scary) books lately? What are you looking forward to reading this fall?

Photo by Patrick Tomasso from Unsplash

The Iowa Summer Writing Festival Students and yours truly at our "Killer Openings" class, July 2022

"Happy Families are all alike; unhappy families are unhappy in their own way."--Tolstoy

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in posession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

--Jane Austen

"I am an invisible man." --Ralph Ellison

In this weekend workshop over Zoom, these ten writers and I discussed what makes a Killer Opening Line, a Killer Opening Paragraph and first page(s), a Killer Inciting Incident, and a Killer First Act. Our purpose was twofold: we studied the subject and workshopped opening scenes in order to write Killer Openings that editors, agents, and readers would not be able to put down; and in order to have a roadmap for ourselves so that we would be able to finish our novels, stories and memoirs.

Some writers came to the class with a project in mind, and some came without any idea about what they were going to write about. Some came with a novel completely finishshed, and these writers were interested in learning how to make their openings more compelling as they revised.

It was a fantastic class and weekend, due in part to the fascinating topic, and due in large part to the fantastic group of writers who participated.

I'll be teaching the class again in the fall, and I'd love to have you in it.

To sign up for the Festival's email list, just write to: iswfestival@uiowa,edu

To check out current listings, go to: The University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival Current Course Catalog

Hope to see you in a future class, so we can write some KILLER OPENINGS together!

Photo by Benjamin Balázs from Unsplash

I don't know anyone who thinks of Roman Polanski, who was convicted of rape of a minor, as a feminist. I haven't read Ira Levin's novel, so perhaps we can thank the original source material and its author for the film's perspective. Or maybe people are complicated, and some men's artistic geniuses are greater (yeah, much greater) than their moral codes. I only know that when I watched Polanski's film Rosemary Baby recently (for only the second time in my life, the first time having been as a college student), I came away with the following revelations: This is a masterpiece; this is a feminist-friendly masterpiece; and this is one of my favorite films of all time.

As I'm working on finishing my own psychological ghost story novel, it was a true inspiration to me.

(Spoiler alert) A plot summary is as follows: Rosemary (like the virgin Mary + an herb; herbs figure prominently in the film) and Guy (just a guy, right?) Woodhouse (played by the luminescent twenty-three year-old Mia Farrow and the kind of funny thirty-nine year-old John Cassavetes) respectively move into a gothic New York City apartment building and make friends with two elderly neighbors who seem warm, friendly, nosy, and fishy. Soon enough, our suspicions are confirmed: thanks to these neighbors, Guy has sold his soul to Satan to become a successful actor. Only, he hasn't sold his soul, he's sold his wife's body. Yep, the neighbors and Guy drug Rosemary so that Beelzebub can rape her and inseminate her with his child. And when Rosemary wakes up to find scratches all over her body from the Dark Lord's claws? Guy tells her he needs to trim his nails! Rosemary says, shocked, "When I was asleep?!" It's a horrifying moment, as the audience realizes Guy is basically saying, Don't worry, honey, the Devil didn't rape you, I did!

As the pregnancy continues, Rosemary becomes less and less in control of her own body, and more and more at the mercy of men: her husband, the Satanic doctor that her neighbors and Guy force her to see, and of course, the half-human, half-Luciferean baby boy growing inside her, who is causing her terrible pain. When she reaches out to another (normal) male doctor for help, he of course thinks she's crazy.

Rosemary played by Mia Farrow is smart. We're never shouting at her to "Get out!" or "Run!" She does the only things she can do. We watch, knowing more than she does, but also knowing she can't do anything else.

I won't spoil the ending. It shows that even in this male-dominated world in which a woman is objectified and used as no more than a vessel for Satan's baby, there is one thing that only a woman can do: be a mama. How this idea is resolved is brilliant.

This is a horror movie in which much of the horror is inside the audience's mind. We have one scene in which we are shown glimpses of the Devil: claws. Eyes. The baby is described but never seen. The scariest monsters are the ones underneath the bed, inside the closet, inside our dreams, and of course, in our society and beside us in bed. It is a great irony that Polanski seemed to understand this better than just about anyone.

movie poster and still from Rosemary's Baby directed and written by Roman Polanski, produced by William Castle and executive produced by Robert Evans for Paramount Pictures, based on the novel by Ira Levin. 1968.

Me in California, Summer, 2021.

Part of my "vision" for this year is to spend more time there. I grew up in San Pedro, and being in the sun in my home state is one of my happy places!

Do you set New Year's resolutions? Intentions? Choose a word of the year? For the last few years, I've done the latter. I try to let my word guide the year, more or less, and it's worked to varying success. This year, I was oscillating between the words "play" and "gratitude," and then, during a Zoom New Year's event focused on choosing our word of the year, hosted by Nina Collins and Revel, for women overy forty, I studied a list of words, and the word "Vision" hit me hard.

As writers, we need "Visions," right? We need to see. I know I need to work on being more observant. I need to see through my vision of this novel and then work on a new vision for the next one. Soon I'll be teaching a class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival on ReVision. When I looked up the word in my favorite dictionary (Merriam-Webster) after the session, I knew I'd found my word:

Essential Meaning of vision

1: the ability to see : sight or eyesightShe has good/poor vision.She has normal vision. = She has 20/20 vision.

: something that you imagine : a picture that you see in your mindWe had visions of fame and fortune.the architect's vision for the new buildingShe had a clear vision of what she wanted to do.

3: something that you see or dream especially as part of a religious or supernatural experienceHe had a vision of Christ.The idea came to me in a vision.

Full Definition of vision

(Entry 1 of 2)

1a: the act or power of seeing : SIGHT

b: the special sense by which the qualities of an object (such as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived through a process in which light rays entering the eye are transformed by the retina into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve

2a: something seen in a dream, trance, or ecstasyespecially : a supernatural appearance that conveys a revelation

b: a thought, concept, or object formed by the imagination

c: a manifestation to the senses of something immateriallook, not at visions, but at realities— Edith Wharton

3a: the act or power of imagination

b(1): mode of seeing or conceiving

(2): unusual discernment or foresighta person of vision

c: direct mystical awareness of the supernatural usually in visible form

4a: something seen

b: a lovely or charming sight

What is your word of the year? If you have one, or if this post has inspired you to choose one, please leave your word in the comments, please!

Full Definition of vision

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