All the World’s a Stage
Author and actress/director/producer Gillian Bagwell draws on her extensive theatre experience in this workshop that will teach you how to use acting tools to create fully developed characters by:
• Putting yourself in your characters’ skin, experiencing their sensory impressions and physical reactions
• Using point of view and narrative voice to deepen characterisation and strengthen emotional connection with the reader
• Creating a detailed imagining of the physical world of your story through your characters’ eyes
• Examining how motivations, circumstances, and inner and outer conflicts affect your characters
• Writing dialogue that illuminates character and relationships
• Putting readers in characters’ heads and hearts
• Giving the flavour of accents and the period speech while being believable as speech.
Participants will receive handouts on Shurtleff’s twelve guideposts; novels, plays, films, and television with effective historical dialogue; using thee and thou; titles and forms of address, and more.
Gillian Bagwell’s first three novels, based on the lives of real Englishwomen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were praised for their vivid and lifelike characters and richly textured, compelling evocation of time and place. She’s currently at work on a novel about Dame Flora MacLeod, the first woman to head a Highland clan, who was chief of the Clan MacLeod from 1935 until her death in 1976. Gillian is a professional actress with credits on stage and screen and many years of experience in theatre as a director and producer, and has put her experience to use in classes and workshops at US and UK HNS conferences on topics, including writing effective historical dialogue, using acting tools to bring characters to life on the page, and giving effective public readings.
The Historical Novel Society UK 2024 conference 