Psychology of Characters in Stories

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk a mile in one of your character's shoes? Writer and teacher Cecilia Magaña takes this walk often by using her education in psychology to craft more realistic protagonists and tell fictional stories. For her, these individuals are the key to engaging readers and viewers and the cornerstone of any good story.

In this course, Cecilia teaches you how to bring complex fictional characters to life using psychological writing and self-discovery techniques. Learn how to create memorable characters and understand their development through past, present, and future.

As a forward to the course, Cecilia Magaña tells you a bit about who she is, what she does, and the stories and authors that have influenced her creative process. She also explains how she builds characters for her fiction stories.

In the next chapter, identify some of the features that give a character substance by observing your surroundings and what comes from within you. Start outlining a character that you can use to approach a topic you want to discuss and define their personal tone to elicit certain emotions.

Then, add depth by using autobiographical resources and what you uncover through research. Answer a set of questions to establish their age, physical appearance, and surrounding context. Explore their inner self to determine what drives them and analyze their relationships with the other characters present in their life.

As a final step, complete your character profile by adding a synopsis of your work–the foundation of your story. To wrap everything up, Cecilia explains how to present your character and their story in different mediums other than literature and encourages you to customize and share your final project.

Create a character profile that contains all the aspects that give them substance and make them unique, as well as an outline of their story that you can use for a future project if you'd like.

Anyone interested in creating literary characters or character concepts for a range of mediums, from picturebooks, comic strips, and graphic novels to audiovisual projects. This course is also great for actors who want to use this approach to add depth to the roles they're currently playing or hope to work on.

No experience in character creation is necessary as this course is an introduction to the art, but you do need to be familiar with online music sharing apps like Spotify and other similar platforms.

As for materials, all you need is a notebook and a pen or a computer with a word processor and basic online search tools.