- Introduction to Creating Characters
Great characters don’t just pop out of the sky. It takes work to develop a fully fleshed out story person who comes alive on the written page. This class will look at how to begin to deveop your characters so they are all individual that readers will identify with or want to get to know better.
- A look at the Physical
Your characters must come alive and our first lessons begin with giving your character a name and starting to develop them physically. This is like starting with a skeleton and building from the bones on out.
- Don’t ignore the Emotional
Your characters need to be unique and this lesson focuses on making them individual with human or other world emotions or quirks. Make them come alive with more than flesh by providing them with unique feelings, thoughts and weaknesses.
- Remember your characters’ History
No character comes from a void. Even orphans and angels have a past. In this lesson we learn how to use that past in building your story and how to use it in your plot line to make your character more individual as well as beginning to provide motivations for your characters’ actions.
- Make your character Develop and Grow
This lesson puts the various parts of your character together to show how to make them work in your story. It will also look at the Character Arc and how to make certain your characters develop over the course of your book.
- Developing heroes and heroines for various genres
Characters are not necessarily the same for all genres. Characters for sweet contemporary romances are different than the larger than life heroes and heroines for fantasy or even thrillers. This lesson focuses on how to create characters for the various genres and still make them unique and realistic.
- Don’t Forget the villain
Villains of all types are needed for just about every story. How can you come up with unique villains who are more than a cardboard cut out of a bad guy? How can you make them worthy opponents for the hero and heroine? This lesson concentrates on coming up with villains who move the story and challenge the main characters.
- Placing your characters within the story
Coming up with characters is only part of the struggle. Once you have them created the
author must know how to use them effectively to move the plot along. This lesson focuses on placing those characters on the written page, defining them through actions, dialogue and emotion.
- Looking at lesser or secondary characters
Every story contains lesser characters who might have a full on secondary role or simply make an appearance. This lesson focuses on how to use secondary characters to help plot, define the hero and heroine or the villain.
- Putting it all together
In our last lesson we put all the elements we’ve been studying to work in scenes that use characters to drive the story and make each work more distinct and unique.
