WriteHive Online Conference 2024: Creating Compelling Characters
Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!
Author Brieanna Wilkoff gave a presentation titled “Creating Compelling Characters” that broke down a system for how she creates characters for her writing. She talked about how people and characters want a lot of things, and how creating a list of these things for your characters can help give them motivation and make them believable and compelling. She gave examples of some of these wants, broken into a variety of categories. She also talked about noting whether the wants were core, moderately important, somewhat important, or trivial to the character.
In addition to establishing these desires for the characters, she also showed how they could be used to drive the story, by giving the character a goal, a motivation, and conflict related to it. Using those desires as the goals (and a portion of the motivation) can make a character’s arc satisfying, whether the goal is external or internal.
The presentation is about 33 minutes long, so you can watch the whole thing and glean more information from it than I’ve presented here!
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