Create Strong Character Goals
Does your reader know exactly what your main character wants? Is your story goal concrete enough so that your reader knows for sure if your main character succeeds or fails at the end of the book?
In this article I give you two ways to test if your character’s story goal is concrete enough so that you can be sure that you have a solid plot and solid character motivation that readers can relate to.
Five Steps to Make your Story Come to Life
Have you ever tried writing something you thought sounded dramatic or powerful in your head only for it to fizzle out once you put words on the page? Maybe it’s an idea for a scene-stealing sidekick or maybe you came up with the perfect way to show your protagonist’s dark side. You sit down in your writing habitat, crack your knuckles to warm up for a steady stream of words to flow . . . and then, pffffttt. It just doesn’t sound anything like it did in your head. Where’s the drama? The heart-pounding action? The tear-jerking emotion? It’s nowhere to be found. This blog post talks about why your story might feel bland and four steps to help you write a story that won’t lose its power when you take it from your imagination to the page.
How to Use Sensory Details to Convey Character Emotion
Deep POV allows you to bypass the author’s voice and go straight to what your viewpoint character is thinking or feeling so you can more deeply connect your reader to the story. Where the author’s voice summarizes, explains, reports, or justifies, deep POV shows reasons for a character’s emotional response to events. In this blog post, we’ll talk about how to use sensory details to convey character emotion.
Do You Have These 5 Archetypes in Your Story?
You probably know your main character (protagonist, hero, heroine), the antagonist, and maybe a couple of other players who show up here and there. But have you stopped to consider whether your cast is well-rounded?
Choosing characters hinges on what they have to accomplish in your story. Sometimes it’s easier to look at your characters as archetypes. Archetypes are fundamental psychological patterns that are basic to all humans. They cross cultural boundaries and have universal appeal or meaning.
In this article, I discuss the top five archetypes that you can usually find in most fiction and how you can start building your own cast of characters based on just these five archetypes.
