Take Your Characters from Flat to Fabulous

Take Your Characters From Flat to Fabulous: Creating Characters Your Readers Will Love, is a two-week-long, interactive on-line workshop. Using lectures, supplemental information, and specific tools, students 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. There will be an assignment after each lesson, and participants will be encouraged to submit their “homework” as well as to ask questions.

We will cover:

• The basics—vital statistics, names, age, voice, and the character interview. A supplemental character sheet and a list of interview questions are included in this lesson.
• 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.
• But What Will People Think?—How do others see your character, and what that can reveal about them.
• What Matters Most?—How the things your characters care about the most can shape them.
•  A list of helpful resources for creating characters.

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.

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. My three best holidays were my visits to Ireland in 2009, 2017, and 2018.

I’m the author of The Claddagh Series, historical romances set in Ireland and beyond, and The Wild Geese Series, in which five Irish heroes return from the American Civil War to find love and adventure.  To date, I’ve had 12 novels and three novellas published.

I’m a member of the Romance Writers of America, Hearts Through History Romance Writers, and the Quebec Writers’ Federation. A lifelong resident of Montreal, Canada, I still live there with my own Celtic hero. I have two adult children.

Reviews:

“Cynthia Owens has deftly created a cast of characters–hero, heroine and secondary players, that quickly become real!” ~ Gerri Bowen, author

“I loved her two main characters.” ~ Nicole Laverdure, Reviewer

“The characters bewitched me!” ~ Candace N, Amazon Reviewer

Cynthia Owens

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