Monthly Meeting
Character: Arcs, Objectives, and Motivations
Saturday, June 15, 2024
Please join us on Saturday, June 15th, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. PT as Elena Taylor discusses character arcs as essential elements to a character's actions. Understanding them can help you finish your draft or polish your final story before submission.
Author and developmental editor Elena Hartwell Taylor will also discuss the super-objectives that drive every action and reaction a character takes. By combining the internal and external super-objectives, writers can understand their characters' motivations in any given situation, helping to determine the course of the book.
The combination of the internal and external super-objectives can also help with building an elevator pitch, preparing a writer for the query process, strengthening rewrites, or polishing a final draft.
Elena Taylor spent several years working in theater as a playwright, director, designer, and educator before turning her storytelling skills to fiction. Her first series, the Eddie Shoes Mysteries, written under the name Elena Hartwell, introduced a quirky mother/daughter crime fighting duo. With All We Buried, Elena returns to her dramatic roots and brings readers a much more serious and atmospheric novel. Located in her beloved Washington State, Elena uses her connection to the environment to produce a forbidding story of small town secrets and things that won’t stay buried. Elena is also a senior editor with Allegory Editing, a developmental editing house, where she works one-on-one with writers to shape and polish manuscripts, short stories, and plays. If you’d like to work with Elena, visit www.allegoryediting.com. Her favorite place to be is at Paradise, the property she and her hubby own south of Spokane, Washington. They live with their horses, Jasper, Radar, and Diggy, their dogs Polar and Wyatt, and their cats Coal Train and Cocoa. Elena holds a B.A. from the University of San Diego, a M.Ed. from the University of Washington, Tacoma, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia.
Elena can be contacted at the following Social Media links:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elenataylorauthor/
Facebook author: https://www.facebook.com/ElenaTaylorAuthor
Facebook personal: https://www.facebook.com/Author.Elena.Taylor
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Elena_TaylorAut
Her books are available at:
Eddie Shoes Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C61LVG3
One Dead, Two to Go (Indiebound) https://bookshop.org/p/books/one-dead-two-to-go-elena-hartwell/21243814?ean=9781504089395
A Cold, Cold World (Launching Aug 6): https://www.amazon.com/Cold-World-Sheriff-Rivers-mystery/dp/1448314062
A Cold, Cold World (IndieBound): https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-cold-cold-world-main-elena-taylor/21166507?ean=9781448314065
