Lackluster, one-size-fits-all characters aren’t enough to keep readers turning those pages and anticipating future books. You need a well-rounded cast of complex, riveting characters to inhabit your story—a constellation of supporting characters to showcase the protagonist Star.

In this month-long class, the Constellation lessons will guide you through:

• Internal and External Character Development
• Character Relationships
• Contrasts, Conflicts, Attractions, Unions
• Building a multi-layered cast of major and supporting characters to fit your story, genre, and theme

To create dimensional characters, we will use a variety of techniques and elements including:

• personality types, Enneagram
• roles and values
• false or self-limiting beliefs, defense mechanisms
• functions.

We will examine relationships like:

• Star Plus One: Protagonist/Antagonist, Hero/Heroine, Star/family member or friend
• Star Plus Two: Triangles. 

You will practice analyzing examples, from bestselling novels, movies or TV shows for cast and character study.

Plenty of instructor feedback and a variety of activities and techniques will help you hone your skills and infuse these elements and concepts into your own story or series.

Constellation’s class goal is to help you dig deep and create the most meaningful character cast to capture the heart of your readers and have them begging for another story with your Stars. So, get out your stargazing snacks, your virtual binoculars, and your creation telescope to assemble an outstanding cast for your story.

Who Should Take This Course:

• For writers who want complex, authentic characters who readers can relate to and connect with, whether they love or despite them.
• For successfully published authors who want to diversify their characters to hold reader interest while exceeding reader expectations.
• For writers who have an idea for a novel but don’t know how to get started writing or populating the story.
• For writers who want to learn and practice some new techniques to analyze characters in bestselling works and award-winning shows and be able to apply that new knowledge to their future writing.
• For novice writers who want to learn more about character creation and development.
• For writers who want to write more quickly by identifying characters contrasts, conflicts, and relationships to fuel character-driven stories so they can avoid tangents, redundancies, and wasted scenes by concentrating on the scenes that advance the character arcs.

Teacher

Lisa Miller retired from teaching and counseling after 30 years. While she loved writing YA fiction, she has been drawn back into teaching. Not always finding the writing classes she needed; Lisa scoured the internet and how-to books for self-instruction. She funneled that knowledge into the creation of the Story Structure Safari class and merged it with her master teaching skills and experience with different learning styles. This is her ninth year to teach the class and she continues to update materials and expand her knowledge to best meet writer needs.

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