In this workshop, we will use a character creation tool to explore a step by step process of inhabiting the characters that we create through our story development and drafting processes. In order to create characters with depth and dramatic potential, we will each create a pen portrait of two of our chosen characters and define their fears, desires, strengths and weaknesses in order to create a fully rounded, realistic character that our audience can easily relate to and invest in. The more that our audience enjoys spending time with our characters, the more demand they have for our work. 

Claire Bennett started her professional writing career at the old Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, where she wrote audio drama. For BBC R4 she wrote The Afternoon Play and two Woman’s Hour serials. Weirdly, decades before podcasts and extreme short form, she wrote a One Minute Soap for The Mo Dutta Radio Show on Radio 2. She left the world of industry and commerce having been given the confidence and tools to do so by Sam Boardman Jacobs and Sue Wilson at Totleigh Barton, where, in the summer of 1995, she loved Arvon’s Writing for Radio course.

She now writes television drama, theatre, short stories, and poetry for performance and is returning to audio.

As a core writer on the BBC Daytime Drama Doctors, Claire had many nominations and won awards, including a Writers Guild of Great Britain Award, a National Soap Award and a Royal Television Society award. She has written for Crossroads, Eastenders and Holby City. She has a drama series in development at the BBC with a duo of peerless collaborators. She is working with Open Theatre in Birmingham and The Ruskin Mill Land Trust to stage an adaptation of her story Ten Shillings Well Spent with a cast that includes members of the neurodiverse community.