In this free online self-paced course, you’ll learn how to design characters for young adult fiction. You’ll start out by looking at originality and using your own unique experiences in your writing – including transporting yourself back into the mind of your teen self – before moving into the world of fiction. You’ll looked at the ways in which character and conflict are intertwined and you’ll get to know your characters by placing them in situations with conflict. You’ll explore dialogue and subtext as a way to demonstrate the conflict in their relationship.
Finally, you will look at the ways in which voice and point of view affect the reader’s relationship to your characters and their conflicts. You’ll finish this course with a completed short story of up to 1,500 words, or the start of a longer piece of YA fiction.
Chelsey Flood
Chelsey Flood is Young Adult fiction writer, who writes under the name C.J Flood. She graduated from the University of East Anglia in 2010 with an MA in creative writing. She’s published two YA novels so far, both with Simon and Schuster. Her first novel, Infinite Sky, won the Branford Boase Award and was written with funding support from the Arts Council. Her second novel Night Wanderers was published in 2016.
She’s based in Bristol, UK.
