Last chance, I just saw that @Siyon Kim you signed up! That's brilliant, thank you. I have sent you an email with the links. If anyone else has a last minute urge to join us, here's the info. The world needs more characters in fiction who are vibrant, authentic, and willing to challenge the status quo. Too often, characters on the page are reduced to tropes—flat and predictable, or written only in relation to others. This course is about changing that. Together, we’ll craft fully realized characters who are completely true to their own voices and stories—even when that upends cultural and societal expectations. This workshop is for fiction writers—whether you’re working on a short story, a novel-in-progress, or simply want to develop stronger characters. You’ll generate new material through short assignments that push you to experiment with different approaches to characterization, while paying attention to the craft choices that make unconventional narrators unforgettable. We’ll look at how the finer details, such as skills, interests, and relationships, can make characters stand taller, speak louder, and live more vividly on the page. Our discussions will help you refine your instincts for when to push against stereotypes and how to create characters who feel original and layered. You’ll generate and submit 1–2,000 new words, and we’ll workshop your writing with a three-point focus: what we loved, where we got a tad lost, and what we want to hear more about. You’ll leave the course with a set of new character-driven pieces, as well as the tools and confidence to continue developing complex, unconventional characters in your fiction. May 20, 2026: 8 Weeks Open to All, Text and Live Video, Zoom sessions Wednesdays at 8 PM Eastern, 2 hours each session. https://writers.com/course/writing-unconventional-characters

The reservation book was still open on the host stand. Vivian Cross had stopped taking reservations six weeks ago — there was no point anymore — but she couldn't bring herself to close it. The last entry was February 14th. Valentine's Day. Table for two. Hargrove — 7 p.m. They had ordered the braised short rib, shared the chocolate lava cake, held hands across the white linen tablecloth. She remembered because she had watched them from the kitchen doorway and thought, this is why I do this. This exact moment. Right here. That was the last night every table was full. Now it was March, and Vivian's — thirty-one years on the corner of Maple and Fifth, thirty-one years of handmade pasta and slow-roasted everything and bread that people had once driven forty minutes to eat — was going down. Not with a bang. Not with a scandal or a health code violation or a grease fire. With something far worse. Silence. Vivian had never posted her restaurant online. Not once. Not a single photograph of the food she plated like artwork, not a single response to the reviews she didn't know people were trying to leave, not a menu, not a Google listing, not a Facebook page. Her daughter Maya had begged her for years. Mom. Just let me set up an Instagram. Just one post. Just one. "My food speaks for itself," Vivian had said. Every single time. Proud as a ship's captain who refused to check the weather. What she didn't understand — what she couldn't see from inside her beautiful, fragrant, dying kitchen — was that the world had stopped listening for food to speak. The world was looking at screens. And on every screen, Vivian's did not exist. The new people didn't know. The tourists passing through didn't know. The young couples on date nights, phones out, searching best romantic dinner near me — they didn't know. They found the places that showed up. They went there. They posted photos. Those places grew louder. More visible. More alive. And Vivian's grew quieter. On a Tuesday in March, her head chef of fourteen years, a soft-spoken man named Gerald who could make a tomato taste like a memory, sat down across from her at table seven and slid an envelope across the linen.

I know, I know, it's not my favourite either but there are so many ways we can approach it. I'm going to share once a week five tips for what to do and how to take a One Pass at a time. Anyway, here's a video and if you want I can find the text or transcripts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ7_kDldCno