About

**Class cancelled due to an emergency with the instructor 10/29. SK**

Conflict is the novel’s engine. It propels the story forward, gives it energy and urgency. And who or what provides your protagonist with conflict? Opposition, in the form of an antagonist or antagonizing force.

Black-and-white villains are easy to write, but unsatisfying for the reader. Your narrative’s engine will stall without a multidimensional antagonistic force. Grit, drama, and tension are created when your antagonist elicits empathy, curiosity, fascination. When they show their vulnerable side (I know I’m not the only one who cried when Luke removed Darth Vader’s mask!). Lady Macbeth, Gollum, Severus Snape, Briony from Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Amy from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl… the antagonists we hate to love as readers are the antagonists we most want to create in our own work.

Through a variety of craft-based exercises and inquiries, this workshop will examine your antagonist’s dimensions, motivations, and desires behind her or his darker forces. 

Julie Christine Johnson is the award-winning author of the novels In Another Life (Sourcebooks, 2016) and The Crows of Beara (Ashland Creek Press, 2017). Her short stories and essays have appeared in several journals, including Emerge Literary Journal; Mud Season Review; Cirque: A Literary Journal of the North Pacific Rim; Cobalt; River Poets Journal, in the print anthologies Stories for Sendai; Up, Do: Flash Fiction by Women Writers; and Three Minus One: Stories of Love and Loss; and featured on the flash fiction podcast No Extra Words. She holds undergraduate degrees in French and psychology and a master’s in international affairs. Julie leads writing workshops and seminars and offers story/developmental editing and writer coaching services. A hiker, yogi, and wine geek, Julie makes her home on the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State.

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