Workshop Description:
Take Your Characters From Flat to Fabulous: Creating Characters Your Readers Will Love 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.
We will cover:
- The basics—vital statistics, names, age, voice, and the character interview.
- 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.
- What Matters Most?—How the things your characters care about the most can shape them.
- The Supporting Cast – Secondary Characters
Included in the class is a workbook with worksheets, resources, assignments and more.
Instructor’s Bio:
I believe I was destined to be interested in history. One of my distant ancestors, Thomas Aubert, reportedly sailed up the St. Lawrence River to discover Canada some 26 years before Jacques Cartier’s 1534 voyage. Another relative was a 17thCentury “King’s Girl,” one of a group of young unmarried girls sent to New France (now the province of Quebec) as brides for the habitants (settlers) there.
My passion for reading made me long to write books like the ones I enjoyed, and I tried penning sequels to my favorite Nancy Drew mysteries. Later, fancying myself a female version of Andrew Lloyd Weber, I drafted a musical set in Paris during WWII.
A former journalist and lifelong Celtophile, I enjoyed a previous career as a reporter/editor for a small chain of community newspapers before returning to my first love, romantic fiction. My stories usually include an Irish setting, hero or heroine, and sometimes all three.
I’m the author of The Claddagh Series, the Wild Geese Series, the Children of the Swan Series, and the Irish Hearts Series. A lifelong resident of Montreal, Canada, I still live there with my own Celtic hero. I have two adult children