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Creating Character Arcs

by K.M. Weiland · K.M. Weiland

A craft guide showing how to structure a protagonist's positive, flat, or negative change arc so it integrates with three-act plot structure, with chapter-by-chapter worksheets for planning growth across a novel.

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Helping Writers Become Authors

K.M. Weiland's website of long-form articles and worksheets on story structure and character arcs; covers arc types such as positive, flat, and negative change, backstory wounds and lies, and step-by-step methods for outlining believable character growth.

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BYU Creative Writing Lectures

Learn character development from Brandon Sanderson's BYU creative writing lectures! Master crafting compelling characters.

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Fundamentals of Acting

Learn acting fundamentals from Samuel L. Jackson! Master acting basics and elevate your performance in this online course.

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Acting-studio.com bundles tutorials and courses focused on core acting techniques—Method, Meisner, and Stanislavski. It features technique explanations, practical exercises, scene work guides, and audition tips to help actors apply these approaches.

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Creative Writing: The Craft of Character

At the center of a good story are the characters in it. In this course aspiring writers will discover how to build and bring to life complex, vivid and unforgettable characters. We will study the choices a writer makes to bring all characters to life on the page, and we will perform written exercises in order to develop a variety of writing and pre-writing techniques, in order to create a variety of characters. We will learn how to use our own life experiences, and the people we know (and how not to!). We will develop inner (thoughts and feelings) and outer (appearance, habits, behavior) lives for our characters and see how that can lead us to richer and more interesting stories. We will breathe life into our characters and let them surprise us.

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The Art of Character

A fiction-writing craft book that draws on psychology, drama, and film to teach writers how to build vivid, emotionally complex characters through backstory, motivation, dialogue, and moral conflict.

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