Master Class: How to Write Complex Emotion with Amanda Stern
Master Class: How to Write Complex Emotion with Amanda Stern
2 Sessions: Monday + Tuesday, July 14 + 15
6:00-8:30pm ET
Amanda Stern
Amanda Stern is the author of 13 books and a dedicated mental health advocate, serving on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind, the organization founded by actor Glenn Close. She has taught her workshop Saying the Unsayable at NYU, Aquinas College, and in private settings. In addition to her career as a professional writer, Stern draws on personal experience with panic disorder and a lifelong effort to recover from a debilitating childhood psychiatric diagnosis. Over the past 25 years, she has studied the somatic expression of emotion, and for the past decade, she has taught writers how to access the unconscious, translate visceral experience into language, and evoke deep emotional resonance in their readers.
Feelings are hard to describe—much less to write well. Many writers rely on physical detail and subtext to convey emotion: to signal loss, for example, a bereft father might catch sight of a man swinging his young daughter around on the beach. We feel the gulf between what one man has lost and what the other still has. The more specific the details, the deeper the emotional resonance. Often in literature, what’s visible hints at what’s absent.
But sometimes, subtext isn’t enough. What if your aim is to articulate what can’t easily be said? How do you write the inner experience of that gulf—how it lives in the body, how it pulses in the throat?
In this class, I’ll teach you methods for identifying and expressing the full range of human emotion. You’ll learn how to drop into your body, explore your own somatic cues, and translate them into language that readers can feel. You’ll also learn how to create emotional atmosphere—not just in your characters, but in the space around them. By the end of this workshop, you’ll walk away with tools to elevate not only your writing, but your ability to communicate the complex, internal world we all share.
Workshop Highlights:
Embodied Emotional Access: Learn how to identify and access emotions through the body, using somatic awareness to uncover authentic emotional content.
Language for the Inexpressible: Gain practical tools for translating nuanced, internal experiences into language that resonates deeply with readers.
Atmospheric Emotion: Develop techniques for infusing emotion into setting, tone, and subtext—creating immersive, emotionally charged scenes without overwriting.
This course has 2 full and 4 partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, July 6.
Amanda Stern is the author of the memoir, Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life (Grand Central Publishing, 2018), which Publisher’s Weekly called, “honest and deeply felt” in a starred review. It was also a Barnes & Noble Discover New Voices Pick for Summer 2018. Her other books include the novel The Long Haul (Soft Skull Press, 2003), which Maggie Estep praised as “spare and gorgeous,” and the nine book Frankly Frannie middle grade series. Her work has appeared in the New York Times; The Believer, Salon.com, Blackbook, St. Ann’s Review, and Post Road. among others. Her personal essays have been included in several anthologies: Love is a Four Letter Word, The Marijuana Chronicles, and Women in Clothes, and her Believer interview with Laurie Anderson was included in Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music. She’s held several fellowships at both The MacDowell Colony (once as the Philip Morris Company Fellow) and at Yaddo. In 2012 she was a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellow.
Amanda was recently appointed to the Advisory Council of Bring Change to Mind, an organization devoted to encouraging dialogue about mental health, and to raising awareness, understanding, and empathy, founded by actress and activist Glenn Close and her sister, Jessie Close.
When asked about what compelled her to revisit the devastating anxiety of her youth in Little Panic, Stern commented, “I spent my entire life convinced that there was a right way to be human, and that I was doing it wrong. Because my panic disorder went ignored until I was 25, I spent much of my youth hiding every terrifying fear I had, assuming that my suffering was shameful. As an adult it took me decades to finally understand that my limitations and differences don’t mean I’ve failed at life.”
Stern hosts, talks, moderates and curates for a variety of programs, including the National Book Awards “5 Under 35;” the BBC; Soundcheck; the MacDowell Colony; and the Brooklyn Public Library’s Gala with Paul Auster. She’s led storytelling workshops for Moleskine, Cirque du Soleil and Proctor & Gamble.
She created the wildly successful Happy Ending Music and Reading Series, which was a staple of Downtown NYC culture for over a decade, and which famously asked leading writers and musicians to not just give a reading or sing, but to take a public risk. The series was a critical success, and its inventive model paved the way for the proliferation of music and reading series created in its wake.
A fourth generation Manhattan native, Stern currently lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.
