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How Does Your Character Change? You know your character must change somehow over the course of your novel. But how? And more than that, how do you sync the changes with the external plot? The middle of a novel can suffer from the dreaded “sagging middle” and it’s mainly because you don’t have a firm [...]
Time Line Helps You Plot I know that my new novel will take place over a 98 hour span of time. So, I’m working with those 98 hours, creating and structuring the time line of the story in these ways.
Character Revision: 8 Ways to Jumpstart a Make Over You have a first draft, but you realize that your character needs work. How do you retrofit a character when you revise? I don’t think of a personality transplant. Instead, I try to add to and enrich a character. Here are 8 suggestions on how to [...]
Use Character Traits to Make Your Character Sympathetic Yesterday, we looked at 9 character traits that can be used to develop sympathy for your character. Today, we’ll look at using those traits in your story. It’s not enough just to tell yourself, or write on a checklist, that your character has these traits and is, [...]
Do you make these 5 plotting mistakes? Are you too nice to your characters? Low tension. Give characters large, overwhelming obstacles to overcome. Of course, you love this dear fellow you created and like any good parent, you want only
Interior Thoughts Reveal Character I spent time yesterday adding more interior thoughts to a character. My critiquers felt they needed to know the character better at this point in the story. I’ve done the requisite “Show, Don’t Tell,” but readers still felt they needed more to really know the character. What does she FEEL here? [...]
A scene goal must have a showdown I’m revising my WIP novel and I’m at the end of the first section of the story. In this section, my character lays out a specific goal, and of course,
I’m worried. :-/ Are my characters boring? One-Note Characters One common difficulty is to create characters with a wide range of emotions. Yes, your character may be chronically sad or mad; but
While my WIP novel is out with readers, I thought I’d look at my process for this novel and how it differed from others. Writing Process for Novels Vary Widely Writing process varies. First, my process was different for this novel. I find this to be always true, that what worked for one novel, won’t [...]
Connecting Emotional and Narrative Arcs The emotional arc is the inner conflict; the narrative arc is the outer conflict. How do you get these two arcs to mesh? Peter Dunne, in his book Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot has a simple suggestion. Dunne says to write the headline of a scene on [...]
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