PWA Workshop with Zoë Somerville - Physicality in Your Writing

Physicality in Your Writing

Essential for nuanced, rounded characterisation, this workshop explores how to write embodied characters. We’ll talk about how to use the physical to reveal emotions and mental states and to enhance your plot, and how to use your characters’ relationships with the world around them and with other people, to write narratives which come alive. We’ll also use examples from great books to discuss how not to overwhelm the reader with physical characteristics or movement, how to avoid cliché and repetition, and when to show and when to tell.

Zoë Somerville is a writer, teacher and editor based in Bath. Her debut novel The Night of the Flood was published in 2020 and her second novel, The Marsh House, in 2022. Both are historical literary mysteries and were inspired by her home county of Norfolk. She is currently writing a novel about madness and identity set in 1950s Cornwall. Zoë is a graduate of the Bath Spa MA in Creative Writing, and is an editor for Blue Pencil Agency. She also holds a BA in French and English Literature and a PGCE and has twenty years of teaching experience.