8 Ways Character Relationships Can Enhance Your Writing

Tonight in the night class I teach at a local university on writing children's books, we'll be talking about how the relationships your characters have can deepen your story's plot, enhance the connection between your characters and readers, raise tension, complicate conflicts, and much more.

The following are 8 ways you can use relationships between your characters to enhance the stories you write:

1. Create resonance with your audience by putting your characters in relationships that matter most to and intrigue your readers 
2. Use your character relationships to better reveal your characters’ personality and inner conflicts 
3. Use character relationships to pull your readers deeper into the story and your characters’ lives 
4. Use your character interactions to give your characters more profound opportunities to experience growth or change 
5. Deepen your plot with character relationships that increase the conflict, tension and emotional/physical stakes of the story 
6. Deepen your plot with character relationships that impede, thwart or help the protagonists’ success, or distract the protagonist from the end goal 
7. Raise the emotional tension of your stories by creating relationship events or taking character relationships in a direction that terrify your readers 
8. Increase the emotional connection between your readers and characters by creating relationship events or taking character relationships in a direction that makes readers worry, sad and/or happy

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