In real life, we observe the people around us to understand what they are thinking and feeling. Facial expression, body language, clothing and other forms of adornment—all convey critical information about the person in front of us. But what feels natural in real life can be maddeningly hard to reproduce on the page. How do you make your characters vividly, physically present to the reader? How do you use their looks to reveal their personalities, thoughts, and feelings?
This multigenre craft talk will explore the methods writers use to capture a character’s physical presence on the page. We will start by reading outstanding examples from published work, fiction and nonfiction, then move on to discuss the ways people in real life reveal themselves through their looks. Afterwards, we will do a series of descriptive exercises that can be utilized in an ongoing project or made the basis of a new project. Come ready to talk, ask questions, write, and share.
Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other publications, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Robert taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for 22 years, advising MFA students on writing their first books. He has also taught at Hollins University in Virginia, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and is a regular at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA from Harvard.
