How do you make people care about a story? How do you create characters that reflect the learner’s challenges? How do you engage readers so that they don’t lose interest? These are questions that writers struggle with for decades, yet instructional designers are expected to just do it – to write scenarios with compelling characters with little guidance. As a result, we sometimes churn out boring scenarios based on implausible plots and driven by characters who don’t talk like real people. Writing narratives with compelling characters is a separate skill from instructional design and it’s a skill that must be deliberately learned and practiced. But when it’s done well, it can make what you create meaningful and memorable to your audience.

In this session, you’ll explore how to create powerful narratives with compelling characters. You’ll begin by defining what makes a story compelling and what qualities your narratives must have to hit the mark. Next, you’ll use a character-driven approach to structuring stories, since we know that characters are often proxies for your learners. Finally, we’ll discuss how adding or enhancing certain elements to a story that can encourage empathy for the characters and potentially for others.

Objectives

• How to identify compelling scenarios
• How to use the provided tools and templates to build character-driven stories in which learners can recognize themselves
• How to craft stories that may generate empathy in learners.