Writing Unconventional Women
with Sarah Leamy
December 10, 2025
Length: 8 Weeks
Open to AllText and Live Video
Zoom sessions Thursdays at 7 PM Eastern
Original price was: $545.00.$465.00Current price is: $465.00.
Original price was: $545.00.$465.00Current price is: $465.00.Enroll Now
The world needs more women in fiction who are vibrant, authentic, and willing to challenge the status quo. Too often, women characters on the page are reduced to tropes—flat and predictable, or written only in relation to others. This course is about changing that. Together, we’ll craft fully realized characters who are completely true to their own voices and stories—even when that upends cultural and societal expectations.
This workshop is for fiction writers—whether you’re working on a short story, a novel-in-progress, or simply want to develop stronger female characters. Each week, you’ll generate new material in class through short assignments that push you to experiment with different approaches to characterization, while paying attention to the craft choices that make unconventional women characters unforgettable. We’ll look at how the finer details, such as skills, interests, and relationships, can make our characters stand taller, speak louder, and live more vividly on the page. Our discussions will help you refine your instincts for when to push against stereotypes and how to create characters who feel original and layered.
Each week, you’ll generate and submit 1-2,000 new words. We’ll also workshop your writing with a three-point focus: what we loved, where we got a tad lost, and what we want to hear more about. You’ll leave the course with a set of new character-driven pieces, as well as the tools and confidence to continue developing complex women characters in your fiction.
Who This Course is For
This course is for fiction writers who want their female characters to stand out rather than be stereotypes and tropes. We will look at how our own cultural backgrounds can blind us to the unconscious ways we write, the language, roles, context and relationships. We will use a variety of examples and I encourage you to bring more to the shared table. This process will directly impact your ongoing projects, building a deeper connection to your unusual female characters and how that impacts the story you want to tell.
Zoom Schedule
We will meet each week on Zoom on Thursdays at 7 PM Eastern. Note: We will not hold class the week of 12/22 due to the Christmas holiday. We will resume class the following week.
Learning and Writing Goals
Learning Goals
In this course, you will:
- Become more aware of how culture affects stereotypes and tropes.
- Develop revision skills that sharpen your language choices to describe all aspects of unconventional characters.
- Understand the subtle ways we can subvert expectations.
- Build out an in depth backstory to give a full authentic life to your protagonist.
- Flesh out a fuller sense of your narrator within your work in progress.
Writing Goals
- A weekly in class writing exercise on specific topics (1-2 pages).
- A weekly home assignment taken from that week’s workshop to revise your ongoing projects.
- Written feedback (one page) from Sarah on each longer assignment.
- An opening chapter, reworked and revised to highlight the depth of your main character.
- Develop a clear revision practice.
Weekly Syllabus
Week One: Playing with identity
How do our characters see themselves? how do friends, family and strangers see them/react to them? Thinking of relationships as they move through the world, both familiar and new. What are their flaws? Strengths? Are they aware of them? What’s their chemistry with another of your characters? We will talk about your own work-in-progress and find ways to help your characters be the unconventional strong women you want to write about.
Writing Prompts: With your character, a new or one you want to develop, write a two-page interaction in the town they live in, include conversations, actions, and something they need from the other person. How do they tease, bicker, play, control, challenge each other?
Feedback: Setting how we support each other, what to offer in terms of constructive feedback and how to ask for what we want from each other. Then, we will share our new scenes and talk about identity, interactions, what we notice in the writing read to us, the patterns and strengths as well as where we wanted more.
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Two: Context
How can we challenge the status quo if we’re not conscious of the cultural expectations in the world you’re creating? We’ll discuss what we each see as ‘normal’ across our different class/religion/race/gender/citizenship experiences. We will create a shared list of such experiences and ideas to be aware of.
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Three: Presentation
How does your protagonist appear, not just physically (clothes) but mannerisms, names, hair, footwear, how do they walk, run, move? Again, playing against the social roles and expectations we can shine a light on our women narrator’s outer differences to reflect inner attitudes. Are they unlikeable or unrelatable because of how they move through the world?
Feedback and discussion on what shifted in how you see and describe these female narrators.
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Four: Backstory: creating a Look Book for your main characters
Working with film studies in the past, I learned the value of finding as much as possible about my protagonists, putting it all together in a digital scrapbook. We will use Pinterest or something similar, and the goal is to layer their history into one visual/audio folder, images of places you see them having lived, music that impacts them in the past and present, styles, homes, vehicles, movies, books, friends.
Writing Prompts: Pick a selection of images, books and movies that affect your character when she comes across them in an unexpected way, e.g. at the supermarket, she sees/hears…
Feedback and discussion on the process and what are your take-aways?
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Five: Actions versus reactions
We’ll look at how different demographics (e.g. gender) and the language we use, the adjectives, verbs, and what is/isn’t expected from our narrators. What do they do in your story that almost nobody else would do? Does it make perfect sense for them to do it because it’s so true to who they are?
Writing Prompts: 2-3 page scene. What will they do when forced to choose between the two things they care about most?
Feedback with a detailed look at verbs, adjectives and more.
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Six: Skills, Work, Hobbies and all the other stuff of life
Let’s consider how your strong and wonderfully different women step outside the box of mainstream expectations as far as what they do for a living or for fun? How does these aspects affect the story/narrative? Their relationships with family and strangers?
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Seven: Uneasy pairings, Tension and release
When our characters have inner conflicts and are outside the social norms, they can be hard to predict because even they don’t know what they’ll do. Now we know our characters better, we can play with lists of unusual potential scenes.
Homework Assignment: Take this process and link it to your own WIP. Take a chapter and rework with these ideas. Revise up to five pages.
Week Eight: Putting it all together
Fighting stereotypes and tropes. Playing with tension. Watching our language. Considering context. And what can we say without saying it?
Feedback: We will then share what changed for us in that opening chapter. What are your take-aways from the eight weeks and how can we carry on?
Original price was: $545.00.$465.00Current price is: $465.00.Enroll Now
Student Feedback for Sarah Leamy:
December 10, 2025
Length: 8 Weeks
Open to AllText and Live Video
Zoom sessions Thursdays at 7 PM Eastern
Original price was: $545.00.$465.00Current price is: $465.00.
Original price was: $545.00.$465.00Current price is: $465.00.Enroll Now
