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Workshops

Character in the Rough:
How to Make Your Characters Shine Like a Diamond

By Cher Gorman

Have you ever received a rejection letter stating that your characters were one dimensional? Did the editor simply jot a note at the top of the manuscript declaring your characters to be light, slight and trite? Are you ready to breathe life into your characters and make them so authentic the pages practically explode?

If so, Character in the Rough: How to Make your Characters Shine like a Diamond is the class for you. By the end of this information-infused class you will have the skills to create characters as enduring as the fiction stars who light up the New York Times with their incandescent bestsellers.

LECTURES:

•	History - Interlock your character’s past and present by constructing an emotional bridge.
•	Personality - Magnify your characters with consistent emotional reactions and patterns.
•	Body Language - Broadcast your character’s emotions through physical elocution or “Bodylation”.
•	Physical Description - Surpass the vanilla laundry list of character descriptions and step up to vivid, fresh and zesty.
•	Speech (dialogue) - Proclaim your character’s emotions by learning to traverse the gap between words and tension.
•	Quirky Characters: Idiosyncratic Story Personalities - Shape secondary characters who provide multi-hued “backlight” to illuminate your protagonist.
•	The Character Diamond - the 4 C’s - Ascend the four points of the Character Diamond and take your characters to an essential fictional zenith.
•	Character Story Road - Explore the essence of your characters by clarifying their Story Road: Beginning, Growth, Rise, Perseverance, Change and Renewal.
•	*Herding Parakeets: The Exceptional* Character and Wrap Up** - Inspire your readers and guild your story with physically or mentally handicapped characters.

After participating in these learning-charged lectures, the class participants will have the tools to laser-cut, refine, polish and buff their characters until they gleam like the brilliant facets of a diamond.

An expert in character development, Cher Gorman is one of the authors of 10 Steps To Creating Memorable Characters. This how-to book, released in December 2006 contains suggestions, ideas, and multiple lists on every imaginable area in a character’s development.

Note: These lectures will be available through Paypal from my web site very soon so stay tuned!