Week 2 Overview: Characters

In Week 2 of the Writing Foundations course, the class focused on character development—one of the key elements of effective storytelling.

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Building on the plotting work from Week 1, students explored ways to create believable and engaging characters for their stories.

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Character Development Exercise

To develop their characters, students completed two short writing exercises:

• Free writing about each character – 5 minutes per character

• Completing a character development worksheet – 10 minutes per character

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These exercises helped students explore their characters’ personalities, motivations, and backgrounds while connecting them to the plots they created in Week 1. I also shared an example of my own five-minute character free write about my character Faye.

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The class then watched the video “Telling the Story: Making Your Characters Come Alive” from the writing.ie website, followed by a discussion about techniques for creating vivid and memorable characters.

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Writing Dialogue Between Characters

Dialogue writing is an important storytelling skill because it reveals character, advances the plot, and brings scenes to life.

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To practice writing dialogue, the class watched the video “Telling the Story: Making Your Characters Talk – Writing Great Dialogue.” Students were then asked to write a short dialogue scene between their two characters.

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The exercise had one key rule: the dialogue had to be written in play-script format, meaning students could only write what the characters say—no description or narration. This helps writers focus on how dialogue reveals character and emotion.

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We also looked at an example from my own story—a short conversation between the characters Faye and George.

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Preparing for Week 3: Setting

These character and dialogue exercises prepared the class for Week 3, when we move on to another essential storytelling element: setting.