Lit Fest - Lighthouse Writers Workshop 2026

Our friends are close, but our enemies are uncomfortably closer, and the protagonist-antagonist relationship is often the most intimate one in any story. For this reason, it’s important to throw your protagonist and antagonist together in all sorts of interesting ways, so the torture can begin. In this hands-on, exercise-driven class, we’ll craft that antagonistic relationship to hit as many trigger points as possible, creating story-propelling conflict and change. Open to all prose writers.

We’re writers. We want to beguile our readers so we write and re-write, polish and agonize over every word and comma. But what information is the reader taking away? And does it match our intentions? In this two-hour session, we’ll examine paragraphs—published examples and our own—and identify what types of information readers glean, how it advances or deepens the plot, story, and characters. When it doesn’t achieve our designs, we’ll diagnose why, what we want to change, and most importantly, how to do so. This is an interactive session in which writers examine their own work, so please bring (or have available) some pages of manuscript.

Your antagonist is totally despicable. But despite horrible behavior, they must be interesting, fully capable of sustaining your reader, and a substantial foil to your protagonist. They must be more than a receptacle for revenge. Avoid the one-dimensional villain and make your antagonist develop beyond their worst act. This craft class will help fiction as well as nonfiction writers give depth to despots, frauds, and mean actors. Writers will use generative exercises, selected excerpts, and discussion to explore possible positive traits in even the most deplorable characters.