Take Your Characters From Flat to Fabulous: Creating Characters Your Readers Will Love

Take Your Characters From Flat to Fabulous: Creating Characters Your Readers Will Love, is a two-week-long, interactive on-line workshop. Using lectures, supplemental information, and specific tools, students will examine how to take a character from a flat, formless idea to a living, breathing, three-dimensional person that readers can root for, care about, and fall in love with. There will be an assignment after each lesson, and participants will be encouraged to submit their “homework” as well as to ask questions.

We will cover:

• The basics—vital statistics, names, age, voice, and the character interview. A supplemental character sheet and a list of interview questions are included in this lesson.
• The Place They Call Home—the space and how to define what it means to the character,
• This is the Moment – Backstory—Using the 5 Ws—Who, What, Where, When and Why—of an incident or incidents that most significantly affected the character.
• Who’s Talking Now? Dialogue—how dialogue and dialect can define a character.
• Body Language—how your character’s body can show what he’s feeling, and what he might want to hide.
• But Why Do They Do It?—how idiosyncrasies and odd habits shape your characters.
• Clothes Make the Man—or Woman!—How a person’s dress reveals who they are.
•  Action and Reaction—How a character’s actions and others’ reactions to them reveal character.
• But What Will People Think?—How do others see your character, and what that can reveal about them.
• What Matters Most?—How the things your characters care about the most can shape them.
•  A list of helpful resources for creating characters.