Learn an innovative solution to confusing characters and their motivations in this full-day workshop with Leah Velez
How do you create characters and build believable worlds based on real-life motivations?
Perhaps you’ve tried filling out lengthy character questionnaires. Or created speech patterns, gaits, or other mannerisms to differentiate one character from another. But you get mired in the details and the results feel stilted or overdone or off somehow.
Your worlds, and the characters who inhabit them, need to be grounded in real-life motivation–not just wants, but deeper needs. These deeper-seated values cause naturally arising reactions to stress and growth, in a way that feels organic and believable.
Using an innovative approach, author and teacher Leah Velez, will teach you how to uncover your characters’ motivations, core wounds, and communication preferences. A combination of the enneagram and roleplaying character matrix, Leah has created a tool to help you understand how worlds, and people, work in life–and in story.
It’s very hard, maybe even near impossible, to step outside of our own views of the world, our own cultures, the ways we were raised, and the languages that we know. This creates confines on our imaginations and resulting writing.
If you’re writing about people and places unfamiliar to you, this tool will give you insight into how other folks and their world views operate, making them more believable in your writing. Even if these insights don’t make it directly onto your published pages, they provide a peek outside your confines, allowing you, as a writer, to create worlds that differ from the ones you live in.
Even if you’re writing about familiar environments and people you know, this tool shows how and why we respond the way we do to different experiences, giving you a deeper understanding on what makes your story, and the people in it, tick. Rather than a formulaic approach to writing, spending time with the results you come up with and noticing their gravitational pull on you, gives you essential feedback and insight.
Tell me more about this magical tool!
The tool Leah co-created is a combination of the D&D character matrix and the enneagram, retooled to use an ethics and values matrix. It gives you a clearer view of the worlds and characters you create. Using it feels invigorating, activating your brain in new ways, and helping you better understand folks you may have had a difficult time understanding before.
This day-long workshop includes different versions of the matrix itself, a handbook, and a card deck that you can use to map your characters, and the social and political systems your characters operate within.
Is this workshop for me?
This workshop is for:
- Writers interested in story structure
- Writers who enjoy figuring out the behind-the-scenes infrastructures for the words on the page
- Writers who like playing with dice and prompts
- Writers who like D&D and other role-playing games might get extra enjoyment from the workshop, but no experience is necessary!
What will I learn?
- Learn a new framework to help you map your characters
- Gain deeper understanding of why your characters behave the way they do – or how they should behave in your story
- Leave with your own matrix card deck to keep using in your writing
- Connect with other writers interested into the workings of characters and their worlds
What will the day be like?
You’ll enjoy lots of time to play with the story-building and character matrix, with the class, in small groups, as well as individual writing time. This is a hands-on workshop where you’ll get time to play with the concepts you’ll learn.
Once you’ve learned the ins and outs of this innovative tool, you’ll work on your own stories, ending the workshop with folks reading the stories they wrote (if you want!).
We’ll begin the day with a fun storytelling game to get everyone’s voice in the room.
Then we’ll explore the character matrix where you’ll get your own set to brainstorm some people, political structures, and philosophies that fit into these different parts of the matrix.
You’ll create characters in class–one with power over another, and explore how that power imbalance shows up in their relationship.
Then you’ll put them both in a society that operates on the rules of a different part of the matrix, playing with the ways this impacts them, and write backstories in small groups.
After this, you’ll put their society in context with other societies around them and explore how these societies have risen and fallen and come in and out of conflict over several generations or holders of power.
We will trickle this back to our main character, and examine how all of these different pulls impact them, and how they navigate these, while aiming to stay true and grow to their fullest selves throughout the story.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
10 am to 5 pm
In-person at the Wordcrafters studio
436 Charnelton St. Ste 100
Eugene, OR 97401
Cost
Access: $149 – if you have limited access to funds
Sustainer: $199 – the actual cost of this program
Patron: $249 – if you have more access to wealth/resources and can support others who need to pay less
Choose the ticket price that best reflects your financial capacity. We trust you to discern your financial situation and your level of need or ability to give to others with less access to wealth.
Learn more about our Pay From Your Heart Pricing.
We want everyone to have access to our writing programs. If you need additional support, please complete our scholarship request form.
Wordcrafters members save 10% on this and other events and classes.
Click here to learn about becoming a Wordcrafter.
HEALTH CONSIDERATIONS
Masks are optional. Please stay home if you’re unwell with any upper respiratory illness.
Your instructor
Leah Velez (they/she) is an interdisciplinary teaching artist and writer from Chicago, who loves using improv, and elements from RPGs for immersive learning experiences. A former high school teacher, and graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA program in fiction, Leah is the founder of TeachWriteNow.
When they’re not involved in some kind of storytelling shenanigans, they can be found dancing around the country on their bus with two cats and an amazing partner in crime.
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