Creating Engaging Characters

Join members of the Writers Alliance on Sunday, May 7, at the Millhopper branch of the Alachua County Library where Mary Bast and Wendy Thornton will present a program on Creating Engaging Characters.

Bast will discuss the use of the Enneagram, a device that has been used for years by writers and screenwriters as a powerful tool to develop original and dimensional characters. She will give a simple overview of the nine Enneagram personalities along with fictional examples of each.

“Whether you are writing memoir or fiction,” she says, “you can easily adapt this approach to strengthen your character’s descriptions and actions.”

Thornton will discuss Developing your Character’s Backstory. How do you create a character that will be engaging to your readers? “Sometimes it’s important for the writer to know more about a character than the reader,” Thornton says. “If you develop the backstory, you may be able to write more realistically, and develop your character’s story in a more engaging way.”

Some things to consider:

•      –  Is the character a good guy or a bad guy?
•      –  Is the character super-normal or super-defective?
•      –  What are your characters’ quirks?
•      –  What are their backgrounds?
•      –  How do you decide these things?

Thornton will answer these questions and offer suggestions and outlines to help you create your characters before you start writing your story.

If you would like to learn more before May 7, go to “Deepening Written Characters with Mary Bast.”

There are also a number of books that delve into this topic. The most comprehensive is The Literary Enneagram: Characters from the Inside Out, in which author Judith Searle shows how knowledge of this model can help writers create “credible character arcs and character-driven plot twists” and “sharpen conflicts between characters to make dramatic situations more compelling.”

Bast has a PhD in Social Psychology. She retired in 2020 from a forty-year career, first as Director of Executive Development for Federated Department Stores, then for a decade as an independent leadership consultant, and another twenty years as a personal coach and mentor using the Enneagram model of nine personalities. In addition to her published poetry and memoir, she is the author of five Enneagram-based books that feature fictionalized stories of clients’ transformational journeys, including the first Enneagram coaching book, Out of the Box Coaching with the Enneagram.

Thornton, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is a prolific freelance writer who helped found the Writers Alliance of Gainesville. Her many works have been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and other literary journals and books. Her memoir, Dear Oprah: How I Beat Cancer and Learned to Love Daytime TV, was published in 2013. Her latest book of essays, Sounding the Depths: Memories with Music published in 2018. Bear Trapped: Blowback (June 2020) is the most recent mystery in her Bear Trapped Series. She has also published two books of short stories: Arrested Motion (2022) and Hanging On (2023). She teaches community ed writing courses at Santa Fe College in Gainesville.