Motivating Your Lazy Characters
Crafting Characters that Force Your Story to Move
Calling All Fiction Writers!
Readers sometimes say that what grabs them is a plot or a storyline, but the honest truth is that they love or hate a story based on its characters. The connection between reader and character can be so strong that it’s almost like wearing someone else’s skin for a while. But what happens if you don’t know how to create characters that jump off the page and grab the reader by the throat? The story dies.
Motivating Your Lazy Characters is a self-paced course that gives you quick, actionable advice on how to craft characters that force your story to move. It’s also useful for writers who have hit a wall and don’t know where their story is going. Often that’s not a problem with the story. It’s a problem with the character. If you figure out how to motivate your characters, they’ll soon be motivating you to sit down and write!
Who it’s for: beginning fiction writers.
Format: 4 self-paced courses
Assignments
Let your characters come to life as you complete short writing assignments that help you apply class concepts to your own characters.
Videos
Watch 4 recorded videos detailing how to escape your writing rut and craft a story you won't want to stop writing and readers won't want to put down.
Community
Get peer support from our online writing community, The Story Hearth. Normally $19.99/mo, course registration includes a one-month free coupon to our writing community.
Course Topics
🗓️ Week 1: What is GMC?
Hint: It's not a car. Learn what it is and why your character needs it.
🗓️ Week 2: Goals vs. Motivations
Learn how they’re different and why both are integral to crafting the perfect antagonist to your hero (or the other way around).
🗓️ Week 3: Conflict & A User's Guide to GMC Charts
Learn how to introduce compelling conflict to your story and how to use GMC charts at different stages of the writing process so your novel doesn’t lose steam.
🗓️ Week 4: Scenes vs. Sequels
Learn the difference between scenes and sequels and why you need both to motivate your lazy characters.
Testimonials
Meet the Instructor
Motivating Your Lazy Characters is taught by the Dean of St. Basil Writers’ Workshop, Deacon Nicholas Kotar. Nicholas Kotar is an award-winning author of 7 fantasy books, 3 non-fiction books, a TV script that was looked at by Netflix, and a full-length classical music libretto. He is also a translator of Russian fairy tales and a speaker whose engagements have taken him throughout the United States to present on storytelling, classical education, and Russian literature, history, and culture.
