Blog
Meet the Teaching Artist: Jared Sayet on Character Psychology, Negative Space, and Building a Story from Scratch
by Writing Workshops Staff
10 hours ago
Ask Jared Sayet for the worst writing advice that sounds smart, and he answers in three words: "Write what you know." It is a fitting position for a teacher who opens his workshop by handing students a pile of arbitrary, sometimes contradictory details and asking them to assemble a human being out of the contradictions.
That exercise is the first step in Introduction to Short Fiction: Building a Story from Scratch, a five-week online workshop. Sayet, whose stories have appeared in North American Review, Booth, and Chiron Review and earned two Pushcart Prize nominations in 2025, also teaches in the creative writing workshop program at the University of Pennsylvania. His method is unusual: the class builds one story together, live, week by week, so that every craft decision happens in the open.
Students leave with three concrete things:
A character profile built on Sayet's own framework of the Identity Myth, the Coping Mantra, and the Unseen Truth. A premise that puts that character under genuine dramatic pressure rather than merely interesting circumstances. And a scene-by-scene structural map, paired with a diagnostic approach to revision that treats a rough draft as a set of decisions worth reconsidering, not a sentence-polishing chore.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Jared:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Jared. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Jared Sayet: I'm an observer. I constantly find myself noticing the subtleties of choice and character in the people around me.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Jared Sayet: You can do whatever you want! (Major caveat: as long as it works - that's the hard part).
"You can do whatever you want! (Major caveat: as long as it works - that's the hard part)."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Jared Sayet: A deeper understanding of how everything a character (i.e. person) does is driven by psychology, and how that psychology determines and enriches story.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Jared Sayet: "It's allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness." - from an article about what Roger Federer told the Golden State Warriors about how he achieved success. He was making the point that it's not just about outworking the competition, it's about building a life around what you love.
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Jared Sayet: A participant was attempting to write a story entirely via dialogue, but many of the lines were blatantly expository. I suggested she consolidate one character's page-long line, where the character (a teacher) details all the ways her students' parents frustrate her, into a single, more natural line: "Don't get me started on the parents." This suggestion made it clear to the group that specific details are often less important than gist, especially in dialogue.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept. A small, specific technique.
Jared Sayet: Ellipsis. Section breaks. Using negative space and jumps in time to charge the events on either side of the break, allowing the reader to engage more actively with the text by detecting and conjuring the intervening events, details, etc.
Spend five weeks learning how choices like these actually get made, with a story the class builds together, live, one decision at a time.
Enroll in Introduction to Short Fiction →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Jared Sayet: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. This series of transcribed conversations between Ondaatje and Walter Murch, the legendary film editor and sound designer behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and other great films ranges far beyond film editing. Murch talks about dreams, memory, intuition, collaboration and the strange ways our minds make connections. Ondaatje is curious enough to follow him down every rabbit hole without ever getting in the way.
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Jared Sayet: Write what you know.
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Jared Sayet: Hating what you've written can be good. That's where you can interrogate what needs to change in order to love it again.
"Hating what you've written can be good. That's where you can interrogate what needs to change in order to love it again."
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Jared Sayet: Cormac McCarthy
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Jared Sayet: Equal parts imaginative and practical.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Jared Sayet: I don't read much contemporary fiction...
Equal parts imaginative and practical is exactly what five weeks with Sayet delivers. Each session turns an abstract craft question into a decision you can actually make on the page: who this person is underneath, what pressure will break them open, where to cut, what to leave in the white space. If you have a story you cannot get started, or a draft you have grown to hate, this is a room built for that. You will leave with a finished draft, a repeatable framework, and a much clearer sense of why your characters do what they do.
Class begins Tuesday, February 16, 2027, and meets Tuesdays via Zoom, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM ET. Bring a draft or bring nothing at all.
Save Your Seat in Introduction to Short Fiction →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
