Creating Charming Characters- A Creative Writing Technique

Good characters generally make a story as captivating as it can be. If they are believable, authentic, and well-rounded, the reader can more easily identify with them. In this class, we will work to develop engrossing, well-designed characters that can captivate a reader's interest. First, we will identify characters we've read about that we feel are well written. We will look at how the authors have portrayed those characters and what made them most interesting. How did we learn about the characters? How did the author develop a persona that the reader can relate to and the story can be built around?  Next we will learn several ways to characterize and populate a story. Some stories are OVER-populated, and it is difficult to get to know the main character. Some stories have isolated characters, so they seem inauthentic if they never interact with others. Most importantly, we will go to the student's writing and help develop believable, loveable characters. We will do this by examining several ways to include information for the reader:  how a character behaves, what a character says, what a character thinks, what other characters say about him/her/it, how other characters act around him/her/it, how a character responds to problems in the storyline. Of course it is always important to include how a character looks. We as authors have in our mind's eye, what we see when we think of the character we are writing, but have we described him/her/it  for our readers?  We will investigate all these ideas and aspects of creating believable, interesting characters, as we discuss and learn in this class. Students will need to bring an working draft of their own writing that includes some aspect of characterization in the text.