Exploring alignment: what makes your characters’ tick?

Need to know your characters’ horoscopes, enneagrams, or Cambellian archetypes? Spinning brilliant plots, but missing the emotional and thematic arcs to match? Either way, alignment charts are an awesome tactic to add to your character-building toolkit.

Alignment charts speak to motivations, morals, and outlooks. Knowing your characters’ alignments makes it easier to figure out how they respond under pressure, how they view other characters, and how to really push their buttons.

In this workshop, we’ll explore alignments by applying the framework to well-known literary, TV and movie characters. Then we’ll walk through how to apply alignment in your own writing to:

• craft believable, nuanced characters        
• outline / plot character growth
• elevate tension and conflict                         
• underscore theme and motifs
• ramp up emotional response

And remember: archetypes and alignments don’t lock characters into boring, predictable patterns; they give writers a framework for characters to evolve, surprise, rebel, or stumble. Life-changing growth for your character? Bet their alignment shifted.

*Though alignment originated with speculative fiction / role-playing games, it is a concept valuable to writers in any genre.

BIO

Anne MacLachlan’s knack for sparking a good story emerged at age four, when she rolled down her window and invited a curious black bear into the family car. Today, armed with the crucial knowledge of when not to let bears inside (always), Anne spends her days managing social media for Ontario’s provincial park system. Her off hours include writing and publishing speculative short fiction, and working on her first novel.

Her love affairs with fiction, social media, and digital gadgetry coexist in a shaky alliance, and she eagerly awaits the day that dragons sweep the Twitterverse (catch up with her on Twitter at @AnneMacLachlan).