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  • Seminar
  • Online: Zoom
  • Adult (18+)

The Art of the Profile

No Longer Enrolling

  • $130.00 Non-Member
  • $110.00 Member

Class Description

The ability to bring a complicated, three-dimensional human being to life on the page is the cornerstone of good writing. Memoirists, fiction writers, and others writing narrative- and character-driven work have much to learn from journalists about crafting characters from real people. Usually associated with magazine writing, profiles can be crassly consumerist or highly literary; as short as a single paragraph or as long as a multi-volume book; homages or take-downs. Whatever form they take, profiles are portraits of living, breathing human beings, and when we report them and write them (and read them) we grapple with sometimes-contradictory goals. Where do our loyalties lie? With our subject? With our readers? With the story itself? With the “truth”?

Together we will piece apart some classic profiles, such as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold,” from Esquire, and Marjorie Williams’s “The Wife,” from Vanity Fair, to ask: what is it that makes these pieces successful? What are the details that brought these characters to life, and how did the writers gain access to them? We will look at the writers’ use of dialogue, physical description, scene-setting, historical/cultural research, and third-party interviews, and then use what we learn as the basis for our own writing.

Scholarships Format/Location

Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.

For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.

This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.

Zoom Participation:

In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.

Zoom Accessibility:

You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.