Creating Believable Characters in Unbelievable Situations

The College of General Studies and the BU Arts Initiative are pleased to welcome award winning novelist, Charlie Jane Anders, to the BUild Lab on Wednesday, April 3 for a writing workshop on Creating Believable Characters in Unbelievable Situations.

Nowadays much of the most interesting Science Fiction and literary fiction feature ludicrous and unreal situations—everyone from George Saunders to George R.R. Martin has some wild storylines where ordinary reality goes out the window. So how do you keep your characters feeling like people the reader could meet on the subway, while putting them in surreal worlds? We will discuss some ideas about how to write characters with believable inner lives and worlds, even when everything around them is coming unglued.

Open to BU Community with registration.

For more events in this residency, please visit our website.

Charlie Jane Anders' latest novel is The City in the Middle of the Night. She's also the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford and Locus awards, and Choir Boy, which won a Lambda Literary Award. She has also written a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies. Her story "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award, and her story "Don't Press Charges And I Won't Sue" won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. She also organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series.