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…
Tag: method acting for writers
4 Ways To Write Dynamic Character Descriptions
Last week, I shared about describing minor characters and how we shouldn’t let these opportunities pass us by. This week, I wanted to dive deep into how our protagonists (and antagonists) describe themselves. This often trips up new writers and offers particular challenges if you’ve chosen to write your whole…
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…
What Deep Point Of View Can Do For Your Writing
Are you struggling to create characters readers care about? Critique partners, editors or agents telling you to dig deeper emotionally? Do you want to write emotional arcs into your stories to keep readers engaged and turning the pages? Deep point of view (POV) is dynamic, visceral, and immediate. The goal…