There are few absolutes in creative writing, but here’s one that’s probably close: “You will never write a story more interesting than the people that are in it. Why? Stories are finite in details; people are infinitely complex.”

This workshop will explore how we construct complicated characters – whether for short stories, novels, cinema, theatre or television – by building detailed behavior that is a generated by age, gender, health, politics, religion, education and so on.  How do train our ear to hear how a seven-year-old speaks versus a seventy year old? And more importantly, how do we translate that onto the blank page? We’ll discover all of this in a four-hour workshop in which we’ll discover simple ways to creatively build character.

GARY GARRISON was an Executive Director for the Dramatist Guild of America from 2007-2017. From 2017 – 2021, he has served as the Director of the Dramatist Guild Institute. Prior to his work at the Guild, Garrison filled the posts of Artistic Director, Producer and full‑time faculty member in the Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he produced over forty-five festivals of new work, collaborating with hundreds of playwrights, directors and actors. He is the author of the critically acclaimed, Playwrights Survival Guide: Keeping the Drama in Your Work and Out of Your Life and A Perfect Ten: Writing and Producing the Ten Minute Play. He is the program director for the Summer Playwriting Intensive for the Kennedy Center. In April of 2014, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts instituted the National Gary Garrison Ten-Minute Play Award given to the best ten-minute play written by a college or university dramatist. www.garygarrison.com