Workshop 6

September 1, 2025

Kristina L. Wildes

Set the Mood First

Opening Song: "Not Sorry" by Pistols at Dawn

This song is unapologetic. It crackles with resistance, with self-assurance, with a kind of emotional fury that refuses to be swallowed. This is not the anthem of someone questioning their place. It is the voice of someone who has decided exactly who they are, no matter the cost.

That is the kind of energy you need this week. Because we are stepping deeper now. Not just into the plot or the setting, but into the people who carry it all.

Where We Left Off

It has been five weeks since we began, and if you have followed along, you have already built the skeleton of a story worth telling. Not from a textbook outline or a formulaic beginning, but from tension, consequence, and emotional honesty.

To make it easier to reflect on your progress, I’ll be adding a dropdown list after every five workshops. These recaps will help you revisit the key lessons, prompts, and emotional turning points we’ve already explored. Whether you’re jumping in late or just need a reminder of where your story’s roots were planted, the dropdown will act as your anchor. We’re building this month by month, but the story is a continuous thread, and these summaries will help you stay connected to every beat along the way.

Workshop 1

Workshop 1 did not begin at the beginning. It dropped you into the storm. There was no worldbuilding, no character backstory, and no slow introduction. Just a single, loaded line: “You’re only alive because I made a promise.” That scene forced a decision. It was not about plot. It was about power. Who held it. Who surrendered it. Who pretended not to want it. You were asked to write without the crutch of a prologue and to create meaning from a single thread of dialogue. And you did. You proved that starting is not about having all the answers. It is about having the courage to follow the tension and let the story begin with something that matters.

Workshop 2

Workshop 2 peeled back the surface. Now that you had a moment, a voice, and a promise, we turned to desire. Not what the character claimed to want, or what they were supposed to want, but the quiet, bitter, aching truth that lives just under the skin. You were challenged to write the motivation behind the moment. The need so deep it may never be spoken aloud. And in doing so, your characters stopped being placeholders in a plot. They became people. People with obsessions, secrets, contradictions, and lies they tell themselves to keep functioning.

Workshop 3

Workshop 3 took all of that pressure and turned it into a shift. You were asked to write the moment when something changes permanently. A betrayal. A reveal. A choice. A line crossed. This was the scene that tilts your story. The point where there is no returning to how things used to be. It was not just about action. It was about emotional fallout. It was about what happens when someone means what they say, even if they regret it later. What happens when someone snaps. Or chooses not to. You wrote the turn. And now your story is spiraling in a new direction.

Workshop 4

Workshop 4 asked you to step outside of your characters and examine the space around them. This was not about exposition. This was not about lore. This was about emotional setting. About how the world feels now that something important has changed. You focused on the sensory landscape. The lighting, the textures, the temperature, the silence, or the sound. You let the setting reflect the psychological state of your characters. You gave the world a voice. You made it respond.

Workshop 5

Workshop 5 finally pulled the lens away from your protagonist and your villain. Instead, it focused on a secondary character. Someone in the shadows. Someone watching. Someone affected by what has already happened. This is where great stories start to gain depth. Because no choice lives in a vacuum. Every action has a ripple. And someone always feels it. You wrote from that vantage point. From the edge of the storm. From the perspective of a character who was never meant to carry the weight, but now cannot avoid it. You added tension. Perspective. Complication.

And now?

Now it is time to pause, turn inward, and bring your attention back to the person at the heart of it all. Not just what they do, but who they are. How they see the world. What shaped them. What scares them. What drives them. What they believe and what they deny. You have written their actions. Now you need to understand their patterns.

Because a character is not fully real until you know what haunts them. What calms them. What infuriates them. What they see, and just as importantly, what they refuse to see. Their emotional reactions are only the surface. Beneath that is an entire ecosystem of memory, behavior, trauma, culture, belief, and bias. This week, you are not just building a protagonist. You are building a person.

You have written the blade.

You have written the want.

You have written the break.

You have written the fallout.

You have written the echo.

Now write the soul.

This Week’s Prompt

Write a scene where your character reveals something.

Through words, mannerisms, or silence. Something that hints at a deeper truth they have not admitted even to themselves.

This is not about writing a diary entry or dumping exposition. It is about sculpting a character in motion, using their dialogue, their tone, their physical reactions, and the choices they make within a scene to show who they are and what shaped them. Let them be specific. Let them be flawed. Let them feel something that even they do not entirely understand.

At the same time, name them. Choose a name that matters. If this character is significant to the plot, even if they do not have a high word count, they need a name. People who shape stories leave shadows behind. Giving them a name anchors them in the world.

Ask yourself:

• What are they afraid of saying out loud?

• How do they speak when they’re lying, or when they think no one is listening?

• What do they cling to when things fall apart?

• How do they physically react to tension? Are their tells noticeable?

These are not just details. They are access points. They allow the reader to recognize your character as real. And once they are real, you can break them beautifully.

Let It Sink In

Reflective Song: "Something in the Water" by Kami Kehoe

This track simmers with tension and sorrow, like secrets rotting just beneath the surface. It’s not loud but it’s not subtle either. There’s something about the way it breathes, dark and slow, that feels like a memory trying to claw its way back into the present.

It is the sound of someone realizing that nothing is what they thought it was. The moment where clarity meets discomfort. The ache of waking up to your own denial. The silence before the storm, when the water looks still, but everything beneath it is already shifting.

Let the song crawl into your bones. Let it stir up the things your character has been avoiding. Then write them standing in it, whatever it is for them. The guilt. The grief. The fear. The truth.

This is the undercurrent that shapes who they are becoming.

Your Goal This Week

First Requirement - Write three to five pages.

Your main character, or another central figure, should come into full focus this week. Choose your lens with care. This is not about inserting backstory. It is about weaving that backstory into the scene so naturally that the reader feels it in every line.

This is the moment where your story turns inward. The external changes have already happened. Now we shift to the internal.

Let this scene reveal something essential. Personal history should surface not in exposition but in tension. Let it slip through during an argument, a moment of stillness, or an encounter that stings a little too much. Let the truth live in subtext, body language, and hesitation.

The setting can support the tone, but this week, it steps into the background so the character can take the spotlight.

By the end of the scene, your character should feel less like a voice on the page and more like someone we could sit across from. Someone with history, with pain, with contradictions that make them real.

Ask yourself:

• What memory is shaping how they speak right now?

• What part of themselves are they protecting?

• What do they want to forget, but cannot?

• What detail would a stranger notice about them in this moment?

• What are they pretending not to feel?

Second Requirement

This week, you are also creating or refining a full character profile. You can use any format that suits your workflow. Whether it is Campfire, Notion, a Word document, or the inside cover of your journal, the format does not matter. What matters is that you go beyond the surface.

Your goal is to build a character so consistent and so dimensional that when you write them into any scene. Whether it is a battle, a breakfast, or a betrayal. Where do they feel alive?

This character profile should include:

• Core personality traits and how they manifest

  • What are they like on a normal day? What changes when they are under pressure? What part of themselves do they hide from others?

• Their strongest memory from childhood and how it shaped them

  • This is not just backstory. It is the lens through which they interpret the world.

• The thing they fear most, and the moment that taught them to fear it

  • Fear is one of the most defining emotions. It impacts their choices, their boundaries, and how they react when cornered.

• What they believe about loyalty, love, violence, and trust

  • These beliefs will govern how they build relationships, break alliances, and decide who they truly are.

• What they notice in a room first and why

  • This tells us how they move through the world. Do they look for exits? Weaknesses? Symbols of status? Or do they search for a familiar face?

• What other characters misunderstand about them

  • This adds tension and irony. It also deepens your ability to write complex dynamics without overexplaining.

• What they are most likely to lie about

  • This is where we find shame, survival instincts, and protective self-deception.

You may already have bits and pieces of this in your head. That is a great start. But this week, your job is to write it down. Make it real. Commit to the depth.

Because later, when you are writing book three and can’t remember if they have a jagged scar on their left hand or their right, this is where you will turn. When a beta reader asks why a character who claimed to hate blood is now slaughtering enemies without pause, you will have a psychological foundation that explains the shift or helps you spot the inconsistency before it breaks immersion.

When you write it down, you are not just organizing facts. You are giving yourself a creative anchor. This is your reference point. Your internal compass. It lets you come back, check your trajectory, and stay consistent even when the story grows complicated.

Your readers are paying attention. They will remember what color her hair was, what he said he feared most, and what they swore they would never do. Give them a character who stays true to themselves or who changes in a way that feels earned.

This profile is not just for you. It is for them. It is how you turn a fictional person into someone unforgettable.

So take the time. Build it. Write with intent. And let that clarity echo in every scene to come.

Craft Focus: Character Realism

One of the most common traps in early writing is building characters who function, but do not feel. They are described by their title, role, or appearance, but not by the depth of their personality or the weight of their experiences. We are told they are the thief, the nurse, the warlord, the best friend. But we do not know how they enter a room. We do not hear the edge in their voice when they lie. We do not understand the silence that stretches after they stop talking.

When characters are defined only by external labels, they become tools. Useful for plot. Easy to forget.

So this week, let’s change that. Let’s build the whole person.

Go beyond what they look like. Go beyond what they do. Ask who they are when they are alone. Ask what they carry that no one else sees. Let the interior world of your character shape how they move through the story. If they are angry, let it show in the tension in their jaw or the shortness of their sentences. If they are scared, show us the decisions they second-guess. If they are broken, show us how they put themselves back together.

This kind of realism is not about having a tragic backstory or a long list of personality traits. It is about writing them like someone whose heartbeat exists outside the page. Someone who does not stop existing just because the scene ends.

Use dialogue that reflects who they are. Not just what they need to say, but how they would say it. Every word should carry rhythm, subtext, or hesitation. Let them speak like someone who has lived a life, not like someone created just to move your plot forward.

Let their physicality reveal what they are trying to hide. The way they adjust their sleeve when nervous. The way they clean their glasses to buy time. The way they walk faster past certain buildings. These are not just details. These are signals. This is emotional realism.

And above all, give importance to who you name.

If a character touches the plot, even for a moment, they are no longer a faceless extra. They become part of the emotional fabric of your story. A nurse in a hallway might be unnamed if they exist only to move a stretcher, but if they lock eyes with your protagonist, offer a piece of advice, or make a decision that alters the outcome, they matter. That is not a background moment. That is a ripple. And ripples deserve names.

Because names are narrative promises. They tell your reader, “Remember this one. They will mean something.”

Think about the names your readers remember most. They are not always the protagonist. Sometimes it is the one who offered a mercy. The one who whispered a warning. The one who said no when everyone else said yes.

So when your character speaks, moves, or alters the course of a moment, let that count. Give them a name. Let them leave a mark. Show us who they are and not just what they do.

That is how you write a character that readers will remember long after they have turned the last page.

Want to Share

If this week’s scene forced you to slow down and really think about who your character is beneath their armor, I want to read it.

Send me the moment where something slipped. A line of dialogue, a habit they couldn’t hide, a truth they almost admitted.

Or leave a comment with your favorite detail. Something so small it almost didn’t make it in, but now you cannot imagine the scene without it.

Real characters stay with us.

Let yours leave a mark.

Next Week: Workshop 7 Preview

Over the past six weeks, you have built a foundation that most writers take months or even years to construct. You’ve written tension. You’ve revealed want. You’ve shattered illusions and crafted emotional weight from silence, setting, and perspective. You’ve dug into the soul of your story.

Now, we turn back to the axis of all great fiction: relationships.

Not necessarily romance. This is broader. Deeper. Sometimes messier.

This is about bonds that bind and bruise. The alliances that hold characters together or tear them apart. This is about the things unsaid between people who matter to each other. The tension that rises when loyalty meets betrayal, when truth falls into the wrong, or right, hands.

Because next week, a relationship will be tested.

Maybe it is two siblings with a secret. Maybe it is a mentor who realizes their student is slipping. Maybe it is a general and their lieutenant. A queen and her servant. A best friend and the one they can no longer protect.

Whatever shape it takes, the weight will be emotional.

And what unfolds from that moment will clarify your entire story’s core. Is this a tale about redemption? About revenge? About survival at any cost?

Relationships determine stakes. They heighten consequences. And next week, you are going to write a moment where one of those relationships fractures, strengthens, or transforms in a way that can never be undone.

Be ready. This is the week that decides whether your characters can still trust each other and whether they should.

Final Thoughts

By Week 6, you are no longer just stringing prompts together. You are building a novel.

This is no longer about getting words on the page for the sake of writing. This is about building people. Complex, contradictory, living beings who breathe through your sentences. You have gone beyond archetypes. Beyond exposition. You are building souls.

And this week’s focus on character realism is not optional. It is the anchor. Because everything that comes next, every twist, every revelation, every heartbreak, only lands if your reader believes in the person it happens to.

So write the whole person.

Not just their name, their job, or their scars. Write their contradictions. Write their fears. Write the things they will never say out loud. Let their silence carry meaning. Let their gestures speak louder than exposition ever could.

You are not writing hollow puppets. You are writing storms wrapped in skin. Anger with intention. Vulnerability with teeth.

Let them live. Let them fail. Let them try again. And when it hurts to write them, when it feels like too much, you are probably doing something right.

Keep going.

Keep shaping the truth out of fiction.

And above all, keep writing.

I’ll see you next week.

-Kristina