This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 638 episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Hot tip for character

relationships. The relationship is a character.

Character relationships are at the heart of most stories.

Few protagonists successfully exist in a vacuum.

Most will be contextualized by their supporting

cast. And more than that, the relationships between characters are often the

single most interesting and entertaining element in any story.

When asking me about my own fiction, people sometimes wonder where I find the first germ of

an actionable idea.

Is a plot or character?

And my answer is that I never know

if I have a story worth telling

until I have two characters talking to each other.

And of course that is plot at its simplest.

Certainly as a reader or viewer,

I am usually less engaged by any one character than I am by character relationships.

This dynamic is most obvious in relationship-oriented stories such as romances,

but it is key in genres of all sorts. For example, the reason I personally

love the film Warrior isn't so much because I particularly like any one character, but because I am engaged by the relationship between

the two estranged brothers who will end up fighting each other.

Although let's be honest, Hot Tom Hardy doesn't hurt anything.

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