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Amy Holder debuts with THE LIPSTICK LAWS Introduced first in 2007, debut children’s authors have formed a cooperative effort to market their books. I featured Revision Stories from the Classes of 2k8 and 2k9 and this feature returns this year with the Class of 2k11. Class of 2008 Class of 2009 MORE 2k11 Guest post [...]
Mini-Conflicts Help Characters Stand Out For my WIP, I’m spending the week fleshing out characters. I”ve written about characters many times. Here’s a Character Checklist, and 15 Days to a Stronger Character, and many other posts on character. At this stage in character development, I’m mostly concerned with creating an interesting mix. For this story, [...]
Random Prompts for Character Development Last year, I bought Natalie Goldberg’s book, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. A friend saw Goldberg present at a bookstore about this book and was impressed, so I bit. Now, I’m not much into writing a memoir. My life has been pretty average. But I’ve [...]
Shh! Don’t tell anyone else, but my character just told me a secret. Great Way to Find Unusual Secrets One common complaint about a first draft is that the characterization needs to be deeper. In Sol Stein’s book, Stein on Writing, Chapter 16 talks about the secret snapshot technique. Stein recommends that you think about [...]
Once again, National Public Radio has changed my ideas of how to use a character quality. I used to think that beliefs had to fall into formal philosophical categories. Wrong. The History of This I Believe From their website: “At the dawn of the Cold War and the height of McCarthyism, Americans from all walks [...]
Characters Who Move According to Mehrabian, 55% of communication depends on body language, 38% on tone-of-voice, and 7% on the words used. That’s bad news for novelists because we don’t have direct access to the body language as we work with our fictional characters – they are just words on a page. Adding body language [...]
Character Profiles include Interior Traits Inside, I’m different than the person you see. Isn’t that true for all of us? We look in a mirror and are amazed at that person staring back. What is your character like on the inside? Interior character qualities may never make it into a description of a character, but [...]
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