The Writer’s Studio: L to the OG: Writing Characters in “Succession”

On February 12, please join us for L to the OG: Writing Characters in Succession, a Writer’s Studio workshop hosted by Jenn Alandy Trahan.

What kind of person sends sixty-seven emails in one night with “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs” as the subject line and what kind of person confesses “the good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is you learn how to live without it” in a karaoke room? Logan, Connor, Kendall, Shiv, and Roman will be in the “boardroom” with us, so to speak, but we’ll also look at Stewy, Marcia, Gerri, Willa, and any character the group would like to analyze as we think about what E.M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel about flat characters and round characters. If you haven’t seen Succession, what have you heard about it? For those who have seen it, what moments in the show encapsulate certain characters for you? What kind of moments truly define an individual? How do people surprise us? We’ll let our discussion of the characters in Succession inspire us to write our own characters in succession, so you’ll leave the workshop with ideas for at least (the same number of Roy siblings) four new characters.

Jenn Alandy Trahan started watching Succession on March 24, 2023 and finished the series in three months (if only she could say the same about writing the first draft of her book). Her work has appeared in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she’s currently a Jones Lecturer here at Stanford teaching English 9CE: Creative Expression, English 90: Fiction Writing, as well as co-teaching a course she designed with Professor Gavin Jones, English 177B/American Studies 177B: Contemporary American Short Stories. She typically feels self-conscious talking about herself in bios such as these, but in the words of Succession’s inimitable Gregory “Greg” Hirsch, “If it is to be said, so it be. So it is.”