Craft Seminar: The Tell Tale Heart: Character Driven Storytelling Secrets with Sunil Yapa
Craft Seminar: The Tell Tale Heart: Character Driven Storytelling Secrets with Sunil Yapa
4 Sessions: Tuesdays, November 26, December 3, 10, 17
8:00-9:30pm ET
Sunil Yapa
10 students
Sunil is the author of the best-selling novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, called “fast-paced and unflinching” by the New Yorker, a “genuine tour-de-force,” by the Seattle Times, and was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. Sunil is an experienced teacher, having taught at The University of Nevada Lake Tahoe, The Center for Fiction, and with Pam Houston’s Writing by Writers. He holds a MFA in fiction from the CUNY Hunter MFA in NYC where he worked with Colum McCann and Peter Carey. He also holds a tv writing certificate from UCLA TV & FILM and has written extensively in fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays.
Great stories make us care; they take us on a rollercoaster of emotion. Yet often as writers we get stuck—poignant character studies without movement, or, a series of random plot moments. How can we bring them together into a story that is as emotionally satisfying as it is gripping?
Using films, tv series, and novels— from Finding Nemo to Ferrante, Breaking Bad to Moonlight—we will break down techniques to tell a story whose heart is a character’s deepest needs, contradictions, vulnerabilities, and secrets. My goal as a novelist and screenwriter is to give you screenwriting tools adapted for the novel so that you can break through on your project. Class includes watching two movies per week, one seminar meeting a week; a manuscript in progress is encouraged but not required.
Topics:
Week 1: You Can’t Always Get What You Want….
Week 2: Contradiction, Vulnerability, Secrets
Week 3: Every Story is a Love Story
Week 4: Hollywood Bullsh*t Demystified
Workshop Highlights:
Watch and dissect 8 films (or long form TV)
Learn character-driven storytelling secrets
Break through on your project in progress
2 partial scholarships available. For information, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
Sunil Yapa is the author of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Lee Boudreaux Books, 2016), a finalist for the 2017 PEN/Faulkner award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. It was also named one of the best books of 2016 by Amazon, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Bustle, and others.
Set during one day of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, the novel was described as “fast-paced and unflinching” by The New Yorker, “a genuine tour-de-force” by The Seattle Times, “generation-defining” by The Toronto Star, and garnered comparisons to Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Tolstoy.
In an interview about the book for Lithub, Yapa notes,“We’re exhausted by our own anger and outrage and looking for reconciliation, looking for something beyond the anger, whatever that might be. In the book I suggest it’s human connection. “Love” is so overused, but yes, it’s that agape love for your fellow human being. Che Guevara said that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. I’m right there with Che.”
Yapa’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, O Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Margins, Hyphen, Slice, LitHub and others. He is the recipient of the 2010 Asian American Short Story Award, sponsored by Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York, and has received scholarships to The New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, The Norman Mailer Writers’ Center in Provincetown and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
An accomplished speaker, Yapa has appeared on public radio and national television, including NPR’s Morning Edition, public radio in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Australia; in 2016 he was a guest on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers. He also spoken about his novel, and its themes of protest, empathy, and hope all over the world, including Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, and more than 100 events in the US.
Yapa holds a BA in economic geography from Penn State University, and received his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City. While at Hunter, Yapa was also awarded the Alumni Scholarship & Welfare Fund Fellowship, which is given to one fiction student every three years, and was twice selected as a Hertog Fellow, working as a research assistant for Zadie Smith and Ben Marcus.
The biracial son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana, Yapa has lived around the world, including The Netherlands, Thailand, Greece, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, China, and India, as well as, London, Montreal, and New York City. He currently divides his time between New York City and Montreal, and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe.
