Crafting Comic Characters

This course is for current and past Stonecoast Students, only

Do you feel doomed to solemnity? Do you wish your characters would crack a smile, or at least a one-liner? Then join me for an evening dedicated to proving that humor, like any other writing skill, can be learned. We'll discuss three techniques savvy writers can employ to build a comic character: unique worldview/strong perspective, incompatible tools to achieve the character’s goal, and the use of flaws to distance or intimate the character to the reader. As a bonus feature, we'll briefly explore methods to build reader expectations so as to subvert them in humorous and absurd ways, termed "reversals", which are the foundation of humor and jokes. 

Kelly Danforth Merrill has an undergrad in Arabic from Brigham Young University and works for the U.S. Department of State. She has an MFA in Creative Writing/Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program,…