Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
What makes a character stay with us long after we’ve finished reading? Is it what they want, what they refuse, the contradictions they carry, or the things they cannot bring themselves to say?
The most compelling characters are rarely defined by elaborate backstories or lists of personality traits. Instead, they reveal themselves through their choices, gestures, memories, desires, and silences.
In this four-week generative workshop, we’ll explore characterization across fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Through readings of Carmen Maria Machado, Ken Liu, Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, and Robert Hayden, we’ll examine how compelling characters emerge through action, voice, point of view, and what remains unsaid. Through discussion, writing prompts, and revision exercises, we’ll practice creating complex, memorable characters without relying on explanation.
Each week explores a different element of characterization: desire, contradiction, voice, and revelation through action and silence. Sessions combine close reading, craft discussion, generative writing, optional sharing, and revision.
Students are welcome to work in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or a combination of genres. Writers may develop new characters or bring existing characters from works in progress.
This course welcomes writers at all levels.
By the end of four weeks, students will:
* explore characterization through desire, contradiction, voice, memory, and action;
* study how accomplished writers and poets create complex, memorable characters;
* generate at least four new pieces or character-centered drafts;
* experiment with characterization across literary forms;
* practice techniques for revealing emotion through gesture, objects, dialogue, and silence;
* learn revision strategies to deepen complexity without overexplaining;
* revise one of the four generated character pieces using techniques explored in the workshop;
* leave class with practical tools for strengthening characterization in future writing.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, identity, and inheritance. Her writing appears in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, and Panoply, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she graduated with Distinguished Honors. A former Director of Rooted & Written at the Writers Grotto, she also teaches generative workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction at San Diego Writers, Ink. Her teaching emphasizes experimentation, close reading, creative discovery, and revision. She is currently working on a poetry collection, What My Mouth Inherited; a short fiction collection, The Mountain Lions; and a novel, A Poppy Flower.