4-Week: Using the Exterior to Express the Interior

In this workshop we'll look at how to show interiority of characters using the setting that serves as the stage on which our characters perform. As a strategy for telling less and showing more, we'll learn to express the emotional world inside a character by instead expanding outward to allow the universe to mirror their within. We'll focus on specific setting techniques and camera shots as methods for capturing the inner world of our characters while providing the reader the cinematic evidence they need to make their own decisions about how so-and-so feels about such-and-such. This is more than just a setting workshop, as the class is focused on showing the reader what our characters are feeling instead of telling them; we'll practice these skills together through a combination of in-class exercises, light homework, sharing, and first-blush feedback. Once we learn how to establish and curate a dominant mood for each scene, we can more fully immerse our beloved readers in our work by surrounding them with these intentionally composed atmospheres. From there, we're better positioned to invite the reader to participate in the narrative via observation, and in the end, if the reader is this invested, we're more likely to alter their interior landscapes, and thus draw out from each one of them their own emotional response to the worlds we work so tirelessly to build.