What Do Your Characters Want? Using Highly Motivated Characters to Drive Stronger Stories
All genres have traps, inherent weaknesses that writers can fall prey to if we aren’t careful. Maybe your literary fiction has beautifully dimensional characters, but not a lot going on. Or maybe your thriller has a high-octane plot, but the characters seem too archetypal or forgettable.
These might seem like opposite problems, but the solution is the same: It’s time to stop thinking of plot and character as separate elements and start using your protagonist’s motivations to fuel the engine of your story, driving the action and enhancing the theme.
In this OnDemand webinar, you'll learn how to leverage your characters' goals and desires from Page 1 to get readers to quickly invest in their journeys, eager to come along for the ride. With plenty of examples from bestsellers across genres, you’ll see how focusing on character motivations as a guiding principle can not only bring your story’s central players to life, but add propulsion to your plot, raise and complicate the stakes, and elevate the themes of your story.
What will You Learn:
- How your characters’ motivations compel readers to care about them
- How to minimize backstory to just the right details to maximize impact
- How your characters’ strengths and flaws should relate to their goals
- How to juggle multiple points of view, each with their own driving motivations
- How to use shortcuts to access the heart of a character
- Why the most relatable characters want very specific things that still feel universal
- How to build tension through characters' conflicting desires
- How character motivations might look different with unreliable narrators
- How to leverage your primary and secondary characters' relationships for enhanced authenticity, complexity, and staying power.
Who Is This Webinar For:
- Fiction writers whose work-in-progress takes too long to gain momentum
- Fiction writers working on an outline or story plan that feels disjointed or incomplete
- Fiction writers who feel their characters are generally stronger than their plots, or vice versa
- Fiction writers who are struggling with pacing and can’t identify why
- Fiction writers who feel stuck in the “muddle in the middle” of their story
- Fiction writers in the drafting stages of their novel, looking for direction
- Fiction writers in the revision stages who need clarity on what isn’t working
- Fiction writers who’ve been told the ending of their story isn’t satisfying the reader
Instructor:
Jessica Strawser
Jessica Strawser is editor-at-large & columnist for Writer’s Digest, where she previously served as editorial director. She is the USA Today bestselling author of seven popular book club novels, including Almost Missed You, Not That I Could Tell (a Book of the Month bestseller), Forget You Know Me, A Million Reasons Why, The Next Thing You Know (a People Magazine Pick), The Last Caretaker, an Amazon Editors’ First Reads selection, and Catch You Later, brand new in October 2024. She has written for The New York Times Modern Love, Publishers Weekly, and others, and is a popular speaker at writing conferences. She lives with her husband and two children in Cincinnati, where she received a 2024 Individual Excellence Award for her fiction from the Ohio Arts Council. Find her on Facebook and Instagram @jessicastrawserauthor.
