Complicating the Characters

In her seminal piece, “Complicating the Narrative,” the journalist Amanda Ripley urges storytellers to find and include details that don’t fit the narrative—on purpose. The idea, Ripley writes, is to “revive complexity in a time of false simplicity.” In this three-hour workshop, we’ll apply this principle to our own writing. We’ll resist tidy narratives and well-worn caricatures and learn to embrace the messy, confounding, illogical wholeness of the human experience. There are no heroes or villains in this class. Instead, we’ll explore what it looks like when one person embodies both (as so many of us inevitably do). The aim is to render our characters in all of their paradoxical fullness. While the focus will be on identifying and capturing this complexity in real people, writers of fiction will be able to apply the ideas covered in class to imagine more nuanced—and, ultimately, more interesting—characters.