A Roadmap for Plot: Using Character to Develop Story with Tim MacGabhann

Course Summary

Adapted from screenwriting, psychoanalytic theory, and creative writing workshops, this 8-week course is intended to help writers figure out what their characters want, and how this can drive – or frustrate – the movement of a piece of plotted fiction (long or short, fiction or nonfiction) from beginning through middle to end. Although suited to realist and genre fiction, some of these ideas and prompts can be turned inside-out, and used to serve an anti-plot or more experimental impulse. Suggestions on how to go in this inverse direction will also be explored.

Course Outline

Mainstream narrative theory and story production workshops tend to consider plot as residing in a single overriding desire, pursued against obstacles, whose frustrations and delays produce a rising sense of conflict and complication that reach their climax in a final satisfaction or frustration, before settling to a new equilibrium.

 This ignores two key elements. First, the sentence, too, has its plots. Grammar, syntax, and punctuation aid and abet (or frustrate) our sense of a story’s drive. Second, desire comes from our knowledge of character. How well do we know them? How well do they know themselves? What do we know that they don’t?

 Exercises and story analysis will unpack these two ignored bases of plot theory and practice. The idea is to learn how the plot of our stories is borne out at a sentence level, leading to tighter, punchier paragraphs (not necessarily transparent and readable ones), which follow the contour of our characters’ inner lives.

Students will submit one five-thousand-word work sample, which may be from a story or a novel. Two will be workshopped for forty minutes each per class, with the remainder of the session given over to exercises and theory intended to deepen our understanding of character so as to generate plot.

Course Outcomes

Participants will learn new methods of listening to their characters and their desires, as well as developing a more fine-grained understanding of their own unconscious default settings with regard to syntax, grammar, punctuation, and sentence-length.

Tim MacGabhann is the author of the novels Call Him Mine (2019) and How to Be Nowhere (2020), the memoir The Black Pool (2025), the short story collection Saints (2025), and the poetry collection Found in a Context of Destruction (2026).

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.