Want to scare your readers? SHOW them what your character is afraid of! Your story needs life or death stakes (and not necessarily the murderous, knife-wielding, gravestone kind of life or death stakes). Fear and the body language of fear, should be topics every novelist strives to know better. Fear…
Category: Deep Point Of View
How To Write About PTSD In Deep Point Of View
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – PTSD – is a popular device for fiction authors. PTSD forces your characters to overcome insurmountable obstacles emotionally and mentally. Characters who are at war with themselves in addition to any external conflict just makes good fiction. The problem is writers research symptoms and run…
4 Ways To Replace Dialogue With Subtext Even New Writers Can Master
Once I realized what subtext was and the different ways I could use it effectively, it became a go-to tool for deep point of view. I had a reader ask: Can subtext replace dialogue and how would that look? Subtext is silent communication. It’s the body language (posture, facial expressions,…
How To Use Beats To Keep Long Dialogue Passages Interesting Even If There’s No Action
There are times in a manuscript where your characters engage in a longer dialogue exchange. Ideally, those dialogue passages are where important information is revealed for readers. In deep point of view, we want to avoid using dialogue tags (he said, she said) but additionally we don’t want readers to…
3 Ingredients You Need To Make Readers Feel
I get so many writers telling me that what they want is to make their readers feel something. Their goal is to make a reader laugh, cry, shake their fist at the sky–whatever, either to cheer on the character or cry in sympathy with them. Deep point of view is…
How To Get Inside Our Character’s Heads And Make Readers Care
Getting readers to care and have an emotional connection to our characters is the gold medal run for most novelists. If readers don’t care, if there’s no emotional pull, it gets easy to place a bookmark in a page and walk away. *womp womp* I’m continuing in my summer series…