Love Your Villains, Hate Your Heroes

Life is much more complicated than victim-perpetrator. In order to craft robust stories, our villains should not be mindless enemies bent on destruction. Nor should our heroes be mindless samaritans who only seek to do good. Both villains and heroes must contain interiority, motivation and even sympathy. This seminar will explore various examples from fiction and nonfiction (including memoir) to identify strategies for developing convincing, complex protagonists and antagonists who are neither entirely "villainous" or "heroic.” If we have time, participants can choose either to rewrite a scene for a piece already in progress or to craft a new scene from a list of prompts.