Torturing Your Characters with Internal and External Conflict

Torture is a messy business but we writers must transform our characters by any means necessary.

Learn how to surface the core conflicts of your story into cruel but useful tensions, inside and out, that will transform your main characters as the story unfolds. Character growth, development and/or transformation, call it what you will, is a fiction fundamental but not every story achieves the promise of the premise when it comes to delivering for readers. First though, you must strengthen your understanding of your story's capacity to 'torture'. Here we’ll show their growth with every technique at your disposal and you'll engineer more compelling stories, inside and out.

Obstacles, reversals, turning points, so many names for the same objective, how will your story inflict the appropriate level of emotional and psychological pain to produce growth in your core characters? We are all changed by what happens to us - alas, even fictional characters cannot escape this immutable fact of life – and so, as writers, we must aspire to mimic life and write what we know.

Also, this is the stuff that keeps readers guessing, hypothesising, riven mad, turning pages frantically until 3am and every writer must aspire to be read with greed, no?

'The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself ' - William Faulkner

We'll go through how to strengthen the internal and external conflict for your protagonist, recognise which conflicts drive every character forward, to pull that tension so tight until it could easily snap and workshop an example together as a group.

LEVEL: This session is designed for writers with a basic understanding of plotting and character development. If you're unsure if that's you, please message me and I'll be happy to advise.

TIMING: Saturday, September 6th from 2:00pm to 5:00pm.

LOCATION: The Artillery Arms, 102 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8ND. Nearest stations are Old Street, Barbican and Moorgate. We have hired the room but please don't bring your own food and drinks. The pub landlord will have my head!

TICKETS: £20.00 and please follow the steps to pay via PayPal when you RSVP. £15.00 if you book before August 30th. NOTE: Refunds will only be provided if the meetup is cancelled by us. We cannot offer credit for another session if you decide not to attend on the day. Please change your RSVP if you no longer plan to attend as we often have people on the waiting list and we'd hate for them to miss out. Thanks so much.