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: Thursdays, May 8, 15, 22, 29
8:00-9:30pm ET
Sunil Yapa
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.
Often novelists and memoirists we get stuck between our high brow ambitions and the low brow demands of the market—poignant character studies without movement, or, a series of random plot moments that feels like empty fluff. The crux of this 4-week master class is how can we cross the divide; how can we use both character and plot to create 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. I am a working novelist and screenwriter; my goal is to give you the screenwriting techniques I use everyday but adapted for novels and memoirs so that you can break through on your own 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: Hitchcock’s Ticking Bomb
Workshop Highlights:
Learn screenwriting tools from a novelist
Watch and breakdown 8 key films and shows
Masterclass to help you find an organic storytelling strategy that fits your needs
This class has 2 partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 2.
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.
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.
