Author Intrusion happens when the author butts into the story to address the audience directly, interrupting the character who’s supposed to be narrating. Sometimes this can be used deliberately to create a certain effect. CS Lewis, Jane Austen, Lemony Snicket…it works for them because it’s purposeful. Deliberate.

As with so many writing problems, intrusion becomes an issue when it’s accidental—when we, the author, meander outside of our character’s viewpoint and start sharing things the character wouldn’t share. For instance…

I tucked my curly black hair into its cap.

This description won’t quite ring true because every narrator is intimately acquainted with the color and texture of their own hair. When they’re talking or thinking, they’re not going to reference the particulars. If I inject those details into the story in this way, the character is no longer narrating. It’s me, the author, interrupting the true storyteller to get information across to readers.

Here’s another example:

And that’s when my neighbor, Rob, burst into the room.

Here, the narrator wouldn’t think of Rob as “my neighbor” because they already know this about him. It’s obvious this information has been included by me, the author, as I try to introduce a new cast member.

So What’s the Big Deal with Intrusion?

In every story, one of your main jobs is to help readers develop a relationship with the viewpoint character. This happens when readers see things from the character’s perspective— sharing in their struggles, identifying with their motivations, wanting them to evolve and be well. All this draws the two close together, and an empathy bond is formed that puts the reader firmly in the character’s corner.

Author intrusion has the opposite effect. Instead of encouraging that close connection, it creates distance between the reader and character. It pulls readers out of the narrative because they realize, even on a subconscious level, that someone else has hijacked the story.

This creates a problem in first-person because there are times when the author needs to pass along information the character wouldn’t typically share. How do we do that from the shadows, in a way that doesn’t pull the reader’s attention?

Slip the Details into What’s Already Happening

Anytime we stop the character’s story to share stuff, we create drag, and the pace suffers. Instead of interrupting story events to relay information, share those details through what’s already happening. Look for a scene where it would be natural for the character to reference those particulars while events are unfolding. In the case of our curly-headed character, maybe as she’s headed outside on a blustery day:

The wind snatched at my hair and whipped it into a tangled mess. I could only imagine what it looked like—a curly black storm cloud scaring away potential suitors, children, and pretty much anyone with eyes.

This rendering mentions the same details (curly black hair), but because they’re shared as part of the story—via the setting (weather), in fact—they’re not intrusive. The reader’s experience isn’t interrupted.

Use Viewpoint Filtering

Another reason this example works is because we’ve stayed true to the character’s viewpoint. Everything is being filtered through her unique perspective. The details she focuses on, her thoughts, the words she uses—her voice is consistent because the author is getting out of the way and letting the character tell the story.

Use Other Characters

Personal appearance details are notoriously tricky to write in first person because they’re not usually things the character would think about. So no matter how you write the passage, it may not sound natural if the character mentions them. An easy workaround is to get someone else to notice those things.

The wind whipped my hair into a frenzy, and Ma groaned. “Gracious, Jess, do something with this curly mop.” She slapped a cap on my head and started shoving my hair into it. “Bad enough it’s black as a dung beetle. Why won’t it lay flat?”

BONUS TIP: Find Each Character’s Voice

One reason intrusion doesn’t work is because the facts are so baldly stated. Every character’s unique personality bleeds into their voice, and when you include observations that lack personality (or sound too much like you), it’s obvious those observations aren’t coming from the character.

If you’ve taken the time to get to know your cast, you’ll know how each person talks, what turns of phrase they would use, and what comparisons they might make–such as comparing someone’s hair to a dung beetle. That will allow you to write in that character’s voice (not your own) while revealing much more than just a few physical details.

That last example, with one short paragraph and a carefully chosen simile, tells us a lot about the speaker; we can infer that Jess’s mom is pushy, outspoken, seems hard to please, and doesn’t much like her daughter’s hair. We get a glimpse into what their relationship is like, and we can imagine a certain twang to her voice that hints at a rural address or upbringing.

We’re able to draw these inferences because the author kept her nose out of the story and just let the characters speak.

What we’re basically talking about here is show-don’t-tell. As authors, we shouldn’t be telling the audience what they need to know. We should be showing it through the characters and what’s already happening in their story. Writers Helping Writers has a ton of resources on how to show effectively, so check those out for more practical tips.

This post is a response to a question from one of our readers, which I originally replied to via a quick video in one of our newsletters. If you have writing- or industry-related questions you’d like us to answer, we’d love to address them. And to receive our occasional newsletter that contains answers to these questions along with other helpful writing advice, sign up here.

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post How to Avoid Author Intrusion in First Person appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

No matter what genre you write, your characters–and their relationships–are the heart of a story. In fact, relationships help us explore our characters’ most meaningful layers while providing readers with the context they need to understand why each character thinks and acts the way they do.

Think about how we all behave in the real world. This looks a bit different depending on who is around, right? It’s no different for a character. Their decisions and choices will be shaped by the type of bond they have with someone. Is the relationship close, or not? Healthy or dysfunctional? Do they play a positive role (a friend, ally, or supporter) or does it run along the lines of something darker, like a rival, enemy, or detractor?

A character’s best and worst qualities may be on display at different times in a relationship, but even better, the type of connection your character has to someone will allow you to seed juicy, show-not-tell clues in your story about their motivations, insecurities, fears, needs, and vulnerabilities.

Relationships come in all shapes and sizes, so Becca and I have built a thesaurus of different common types so you can write them with authority. You can find it at One Stop for Writers, as part of our enormous show-don’t-tell THESAURUS.

The Relationship Thesaurus will help you brainstorm character interactions that feel true to life so you can write them into the story. You’ll also find plenty of ideas on how each relationship can develop your characters and further the plot.

If you’d like a peek at this thesaurus, visit these entries at One Stop for Writers: RIVALS, IN-LAWS, and PROTAGONIST AND CRUSH.

If this is the first time you’ve heard about our THESAURUS Database at One Stop for Writers, think of it like our books on steroids. We’ve released 10 thesaurus books to date, but at One Stop for Writers, the database has 18 thesaurus topics…so far.

Speaking of One Stop for Writers, Don’t Forget…

It’s our birthday!

One Stop for Writers is turning 9 this week, and we’re celebrating with a nice 25% discount on any plan.

If you like, grab this code:

HAPPY9

And follow the instructions below to redeem this discount!

To use this code:

1. Sign up or sign in.
2. Choose any paid subscription (1-month, 6-month, or 12-months) and add this code: HAPPY9 to the coupon box.
3. Once activated via the button, a one-time 25% discount will apply onscreen.
4. Add your payment method, check the Terms box, and then hit the subscribe button.

New to One Stop for Writers? Join Becca for a quick tour to see how our resources and tools can help you reach your creative goals.

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post A Description Database for Character Relationships appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Is there anything more frustrating than knowing there’s a problem with our story, but not being sure how to fix it?

We wish for an easy button in these moments, but sadly, none exist. Occasionally though, we get lucky and discover a versatile story element or technique so useful it can help us navigate past MANY story problems!

So, storytellers…ready to meet your new best friend?

The All-Powerful Emotion Amplifier

Emotion amplifiers are unique states or conditions that act as a challenge, conflict, and emotional destabilizer all rolled into one. They generate internal strain and emotional volatility which can lead to a loss of control, sending your character on a crash course with missteps and mistakes!

Sounds bad, right? Well, it is…for the character. But for your story, it’s great!

Let’s look at a specific amplifier: scrutiny.

Scrutiny: being observed or critically examined.

Now, imagine yourself for a moment, will you?

You’re merrily typing away on your computer, drafting your latest story. Your brain is full of ideas! The words are flowing! And then your mother-in-law appears and begins reading over your shoulder.

Or:

You’re hosting the family barbeque and your sister-in-law arrives, sits at a picnic table, and proceeds to scowl at everything in view. She examines your cutlery as if it has never seen a dishwasher, smells the potato salad before adding it to her plate, and makes a show of picking off the burned bits of her chicken.

Can you hear the lambs screaming, Clarisse?

Face it, scrutiny is not fun. Whether it’s you, me, or a character, it gets in our heads, makes us hyperaware of our flaws, and whatever task we’re working on instantly becomes harder.

Even if an observer is expected–say at a competition–a person will have to have a strong mental focus not to be thrown off their game. So, you can imagine how our character, grappling with the weight of story problems, responsibilities, and emotional struggles, might react if we added scrutiny to the mix. You can just see how it would become that one burden too much, and in their frustration, they’d lash out or do something else that would take their situation from bad to worse.

Pain, exhaustion, hunger, competition, danger, attraction…amplifiers come in all shapes and sizes, and can help with story problems when used strategically.  

Common Story Problems

NOT ENOUGH CONFLICT:

An amplifier is an added challenge to navigate that, when intense enough, will cause our characters to lose control. When they do, they act on emotion, not thought, and this has repercussions: poor decisions that lead to mistakes, choices that carry unforeseen consequences, and new complications they didn’t think about in the heat of the moment. In other words, conflict!

LOW STAKES:

When there’s not enough on the line, readers tune out. One of the best ways to raise the stakes is to make things more personal. Imagine your character poorly navigating an amplifier like danger, competition, or intoxication and making a mistake that hurts someone or puts an important goal at risk. When a character screws up and feels responsible, undoing the harm they did becomes a personal mission. Readers will tune in because 1) they can’t help but empathize over making a costly mistake and 2) they feel tension knowing the character can’t afford to fail or lose control again.

PASSIVE CHARACTERS (NO AGENCY):

Readers are drawn to characters with agency, those who steer their fate and take charge, not ones who let others solve their problems. Emotion amplifiers get passive characters to step up because they inflict urgency, motivating the character to find relief from the strain one causes.

A starving character must find food (Hunger), a character lost in the woods must find their way to safety (Physical Disorientation), and a character suffering from Sleep Deprivation must secure rest before their body gives in.

LOW TENSION:

Tension, that stretchy feeling that comes when a person is unsure what will happen next, is something we want to build into every page. Because amplifiers cause characters to be emotionally unstable, readers feel tension as they read on to see if the character can handle the strain because if they can’t, it will cost them.

HIDDEN EMOTION:

In many situations, characters hide what they feel because they don’t want to be judged, feel vulnerable, or be viewed as weak. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for readers to get close enough to know what’s going on behind their stony exterior and feel empathy for what the character is experiencing.

This is why amplifiers are great to deploy. Like a boiling kettle, adding a nice dollop of pain, pressure, exhaustion, or even arousal, and suddenly those repressed feelings bubble up and spill out, putting the very emotions they’re hiding on display!

SHOWING CHARACTER GROWTH:

How well (or poorly) a character responds to problems and stressors can say a lot about them, revealing how much growth is required to achieve their goal. Emotion amplifiers are many things, including tests. If the character handles an amplifier poorly, they face the fallout and deal with the consequences. But it also teaches them what not to do next time, so if you later hit them with the same (or similar) amplifier again and they handle it better, it is a neon sign to readers that the character is evolving.

PERFECT CHARACTERS:

Perfect characters are a turn-off because they don’t feel realistic. Readers are drawn to characters who are true to life, meaning they’ll lose their cool, have bad judgment, and screw things up at times. You can show all this through the poor handling of an emotion amplifier! Characters who don’t handle stress and pressure will feel more authentic because readers have had their own struggles in that department and know what it’s like. Seeing characters in the same situation is relatable, and makes it easier to cheer them on as they work through the complications in the aftermath.

UNCLEAR MOTIVATION:

In every scene, readers should know the character’s goal and why they are pursuing it. If you need to redirect and show a clear scene goal, amplifiers can help. Whatever it is–pain, stress, pressure, dehydration–it’s causing a form of strain, meaning your character’s goal will be to manage or free themselves from it.

HAPPY CHARACTERS IN A HAPPY LAND:

Like low-conflict situations, we also don’t want characters to be happy for too long. Time to time, your character comes out on top, ending a scene in a win. An emotion amplifier like an injury, illness, or exhaustion is a great way to give them a new situational problem to focus on.

LACK OF RELATIONSHIP FRICTION:

Stories where everyone gets along and supports one another will eventually elicit yawns from readers. People rub against one another, and it’s not always a bad thing when they do so. Sometimes it needs to happen for important realizations to take place for a character to examine boundaries, and expectations, or achieve personal growth.

An amplifier can bring forth friction because if a character mishandles the strain of it, they may lash out, question loyalty or motivations, shut people out, or do other things that will cause misunderstandings. Any damage they do to the relationship will need to be undone, giving the character a chance to see things from the perspective of the one they hurt, and to practice accountability, both of which can strengthen the relationship long-term.

PREDICTABILITY:

Some stories can become predictable if certain plot elements, character types, and other genre expectations strain a writer’s ability to be creative. Emotion Amplifiers come in all sizes and shapes, meaning choosing the right one can easily transform a premise, conflict scenario, or relationship dynamics, elevating it into something fresh. For example, wouldn’t it be great to see a pro-athlete character struggling with sensory overload when he hits it big, a love interest trying to manage her compulsions, or a pregnant police detective hunting down serial killers?

LOW READER ENGAGEMENT:

If an agent, editor, or beta reader has even mentioned that they struggled to connect with your character, chances are two things have happened. One, the character’s emotions are not accessible enough to the reader, meaning they are too well hidden or repressed, or two, there isn’t enough common ground between the reader and your character for empathy to form.

Emotion Amplifiers help with both issues, bringing emotions to the surface through volatility and a common ground experience readers can bond with characters over.

All readers know what it is like to feel internal strain and, if they give in to it, make mistakes they’ll regret. They empathize with characters having to do the hard work of fixing what they’ve broken. Should the character successfully stay in control of their emotional responses despite the strain an amplifier causes, readers rejoice with the character for mastering the moment and rising above their stress and struggle. Win-win!

If you’ve not yet dove into the wonderful world of emotion amplifiers, I hope you’ll change that. Start by reading this introductory post, checking out this list of amplifiers, and then seeing if The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Stress and Volatility is the life preserver your story needs.  

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post How to Fix Big Story Problems appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Have you ever watched a movie based on a book you read and realized the book is so much better? As a writer, this phenomenon excites me, because we can create an experience for readers with words that studios are desperate to replicate with their huge budgets. But how can that be? Will books become obsolete as more and more content streams into homes? I highly doubt it. Writers have a few tricks up their sleeves that movies can’t use. And if you combine these elements on your pages, you’ll create an immersive experience that all the money in the world can’t put on the screen.

Movies rely on 3 elements of writing in their scripts to tell their stories – Setting, Dialogue, and Actions.

They can also use music, lighting, and special effects to enhance the whole experience.

Writers have 2 extra elements at their disposal – Reactions, and Inner Thoughts.

(Strictly speaking, movies can try to replicate Inner Thoughts by using an actor’s voiceover, but that gets annoying quickly if overused – advantage, writers!)

That’s right, only in books can a reader climb into a character’s skin and experience their world through their eyes. This is why books aren’t going anywhere, and why many times, the book is better than the movie!

The 5 Elements of Writing Include

Element 1: Setting – Your world is alive in your head as you write. Make sure that you’re giving your reader some hints along the way to help them construct your beautiful world in their minds. Try sprinkling 2-3 details of your world by letting your characters interact with your setting at the top of each scene, or immediately after the characters arrive at a new destination within a scene to make your setting pop.

Element 2: Dialogue – Just like a movie director, you as the writer can decide when to zoom way out and let time pass quickly for your characters, sharing only summary details like a movie montage, or zoom right in close and hear everything that they have to say. Dialogue is a great tool to include when you’re zooming in, letting us hear the actual words that characters say to one another. Dialogue in books is trickier to punctuate than you think, and many writers get this wrong, consistently. Check out my dialogue punctuation cheat sheet that should clear up any questions you have and get you punctuating dialogue like a pro, once and for all.

Element 3: Actions – This element includes describing all the stuff that characters get up to in your book. These actions can be small, such as scratching a nose during a conversation, or huge, such as jumping in front of a moving train to save their nemesis and furthering your plot.

Element 4: Reactions – When done right, sharing how a character reacts or feels in their Point of View will have your reader laughing, crying, or sitting on the edge of their seat right along with your characters! The Emotion Thesaurus is an amazing resource to get your creative juices flowing and practice how to get these emotions and reactions on your page.

Element 5: Inner Thoughts – This one is the slam dunk element that will tip your readers over the edge, falling into your pages. Whether you have a narrator, or it’s written from a character’s Point of View (POV), they are your reader’s guide on the journey, and will let the reader know how to feel and react to the story as they go. Let this inner voice of your POV character(s) shine, giving meaning to the events that unfold in your book’s plot. This element is what gives your story personality, helping it stand out from the rest, so have fun with it. 

What if the 5 Elements of Writing aren’t Balanced on Your Pages? 

Have you ever read (or written!) a scene that feels a little flat, and you just can’t seem to put your finger on why? Chances are, the writer has leaned too heavily on 1-2 of these elements of writing for a page or more, without taking full advantage of the full range at their disposal. Reading passages like this feels more like a chore, and readers will disengage.

Some examples of the elements being out of balance are:

• Including long paragraphs of setting description clumped together without anything happening in the scene. Readers can only digest so much information at once, and if you include too much (commonly referred to as an info dump), readers will start to skim to get back to the action on the page, missing all your beautiful descriptions.
• A page or more of quick back and forth dialogue, with minimal actions inserted between what each character is saying. This is a problem commonly called talking heads, where it feels like your characters are just heads blabbing back and forth, not providing any context. You can have quick exchanges, but keep these short and to the point for maximum impact.
• Long tirades in a character’s head (Inner Thoughts), while not moving the story forward. This one feels a lot like an info dump to read.
• Scenes that go from action to action, meticulously detailing the things your characters do, without giving them time to React, or reflect on what it means to them in that moment using Inner Thoughts.

The good news is, this imbalance is easy to spot when reading your own drafts, and easy to fix. In addition to simply counting the number of elements you’ve used on each page using the list in this article, you can spot areas in your draft that need attention quickly, paying attention to the white space on the page.

• A long section relying heavily on quick dialogue is easy to spot when there is lots of white space on your page.
• Too much setting description or inner thoughts is easy to spot when the text is dense on your pages, with long paragraphs and few breaks

Having awareness of the 5 Elements of Writing in your writers’ toolbelt will help you craft pages that hold your reader’s attention, making it feel three dimensional. Using 3 or more of these Elements on each page will keep your reader’s brain engaged and make your scenes feel richer and fuller, even better than the movie will be when it comes out.

SUZY VADORI - Resident Writing Coach

Suzy Vadori is the award-winning author of The Fountain Series. She is a certified Book Coach with Author Accelerator and the Founder of Wicked Good Fiction Bootcamp. Suzy breaks down important writing concepts into practical steps to make it easy for writers coming from outside the industry to get up to speed in a snap, so that they can realize their big, wild writing dreams!

In addition to her weekly newsletter encouraging writers, and online courses, Suzy offers both developmental editing and 1:1 Book Coaching. Find out more about our RWC team here and discover how to connect with Suzy and all the resources she has to offer here.

The post Using the 5 Elements of Writing to Immerse Readers appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

If there’s one thing writers like to do, it’s to make characters suffer. We are all about bringing forth pain and crises, whether it be emotional, physical, spiritual, or existential. Is it because we’re a little messed up and we enjoy torturing characters? Or do we create difficult scenarios in our stories to illustrate the fact that life is painful sometimes?

Probably both.

No matter what our reasons for holding our character’s figurative (and possibly literal) feet to the fire, we need to do a bang up job of describing it. So join us for a deep dive on all things painful, starting with…

Pain & Your Characters: The Three Stages of Awareness

Before: Anticipating Pain

Sometimes a character won’t see a threat coming, but if they do, we gain a terrific opportunity to draw readers into the moment and heighten their emotions alongside the character’s. The anticipation of pain is something we all know, and so it’s an effective way to generate empathy for characters experiencing it.

When something bad is about to happen, a character may only have a heartbeat or two to steel themselves, tensing their muscles clamping their teeth tight, flinching and squeezing their eyes shut. To try and protect themselves further, they might also try to make themselves small, a full body cringe. Or it could be a natural reaction to duck, jerk back, pull away, or attempt to flee. These are all their instinctual fight-or-flight responses kicking in, doing whatever is necessary to protect them (or those they love) in the few seconds they have.

If the threat is farther out, the character’s brain has more time to churn through what might happen. Their knowledge and experiences will conjure up mental flashes of what will happen and the likely wounds and injuries which could occur. Memories may also assault them, reminding them of painful things that have happened to them, and the inescapable weight of dread hits them.

To spur them into action, their adrenaline surges, prompting them to respond in some way – fight, or flee. But if there’s nothing they can do, they may experience a skin crawling sensation in expectation of the painful sensations to come.

Pain isn’t always physical, of course. If they see something coming that they know will hurt them emotionally, your character could become depressed, and at a loss over what to do. Or even though they know what’s coming can’t be avoided, they may stay in bed, refuse to go out, avoid people, lie, or do something else that lines up with a flight response. They could also become anxious, obsess about what’s going to happen, and force a confrontation before they’re fully prepared to deal with it (a fight response).

The source of pain could be anything – a secret about to be uncovered, a marriage nearing the point of ending, or their own child who is dying in the hospital. While we often think about how to cause characters physical pain, mental and emotional pain are just as debilitating.

TIP: Whatever type of pain your character is experiencing, think about their personality, coping methods, and personal fears. This will help you determine how they will respond to threats that bring pain.

During: Physiological and Psychological Processes

When your character feels discomfort, certain things happen. If there’s a physical component, pain receptors pick up on the type of sensory input: heat, friction, tension, cold, pressure, etc. and sends signals to the brain about the area affected, the type of pain, and intensity level. Your character’s instinctual response will be to flee pain, so unless there’s a compelling reason why they must not, you can show your character trying to pull away and escape whatever is hurting them. This is especially the case when they see indicators of damage (a gash, a broken bone, blood, etc.), because the gravity of what’s happening to them hits home.

Your character’s emotional state will also influence how much pain they feel. If the source of it is tied to a fear, emotionally wounding experience, or their anxiety is triggered, the discomfort they feel will be intensified. Pain levels can become so excruciating that a character passes out or enters a state of shock. This is where the body systems slow and they become distanced from their agony.

Another way to use emotion in these situations is to consider feelings that might help them cope with the pain better: anger, rage, determination, etc. They can also use coping mechanisms to handle discomfort, turning to meditation, breathing exercises, self-distraction, talk therapy, etc. to work through it. Some characters might try to numb it with medications, drugs, or alcohol, but if they are attempting to manage pain through mind over matter, it will only work to a certain point. If the pain is extreme, they will no longer be able to handle it, and their responses will become extreme — screaming, writhing, or even passing out.

Characters will also experience a stress reaction to pain, meaning their heart rate and blood pressure can rise, their body becomes increasingly tense, their breathing may change and tears may form.

TIP: Using POV visceral sensations to show what they’re experiencing is a great way to communicate the strain they’re under.

After: Recovery and Aftereffects

After an injury or event that causes pain, your character may have a hard time with mobility, balance, and cognitive processing, so keep this in mind when you show readers what happens next. Your character likely will try and protect the injury, meaning they may hunch over as they walk, cradle a broken arm, limp, or do everything with one hand to save more injury to the other. They might have a loss of energy or motor control, have a delayed reaction time, and seek to distance themselves from others so they can process what happened and heal in private. So think about what your character will be doing in the aftermath of a bodily injury.

Everyone copes with pain differently, especially pain that scores an emotional hit. Time will be needed to fully process what happened, and if the emotional hurt is far too painful to examine, characters try to bury it rather than work through it in a healthy way, leading to personality and behavioral shifts that change how they interact with the world and those in it. Unresolved emotional wounds are sources of ongoing pain, so a bit of research here on what this looks like for the type of wound is key.

If your character suffered a physical injury or illness, the healing process can include different types of pain – tenderness, strain, headaches, itchiness, and the like. They may need to rest or sleep more, and if this is impossible because the danger in ongoing, their energy may drain further. It could slow their healing, and open them to infections and more injuries.

After an injury heals, your character may have scars, less range of movement, or suffer debilitating migraines or other internal reactions. Depending on what they experienced, they may also carry new fears, anxieties, a decreased ability to take risks, and even PTSD or other conditions that they will carry with them. Each new encounter with pain will make your character more wary and watchful for any circumstances where it might reoccur, so remember that as they move forward in the story.

Realistic Fiction Sometimes Means Ignoring Hollywood

Because movies only have so much time to show everything they need to, the stages of pain awareness are sometimes skimmed over. Often there’s a split-second awareness of danger and then the camera focuses on the character being injured, whether it’s a gun shot wound to the thigh or a six-pack of punches to the gut. They falter briefly, then rally to win. But when we see them again after the climax, they are usually not as in bad shape as they should be, or are miraculously fine (I’m looking at you, Jack Ryan, and your ability to be perky and ready to go after several rounds of boiling water-and-salt torture!).

Movies and TV can sometimes get away with this, but books, not so much. Readers want to share the character’s experience, so this means showing things that are true-to-life. You don’t have to go overboard and show every detail, but make sure to convey enough of the before-during-after chain that readers feel the character is responding realistically to pain and injury.

Need more ideas on how to show pain? You’ll find this entry in our Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus.

Other Posts in This Pain Series:

Different Types to Explore
Describing Minor Injuries
Describing Major and Mortal Injuries
Invisible Injuries and Conditions
Factors that Help or Hinder the Ability to Cope
Taking an Injury from Bad to Worse
Everyday Ways a Character Could Be Hurt
Best Practices for Great Fiction

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Writing About Pain: Three Stages of Awareness appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Voice is one of those elements that can make or break a manuscript. If you get it right, the novel will live in the reader’s mind long after they put the book down. Without it, the story won’t quite achieve what you’ve intended even if all the structural elements are in place.

So… how do you find your narrator’s voice?

What Doesn’t Work

Here’s one thing that doesn’t work: verbal tics. How many times can you have your character repeat certain phrases before it starts to get, well, annoying? Not very many.

Here’s another: sarcasm.

Sarcasm is an easy voice to capture, so it seems to be the one many authors lean toward to make their narrator sound different. Cross it off the list. No one is consistently sarcastic, or angry, or melodramatic. When you make your narrator into a type like this, they come across as one-dimensional and unrealistic.

Who Is This Person?

The idea of voice only being a mood or a way of talking misses the bigger picture. Voice is a way of being in the world. For that reason, I would recommend approaching it from another direction: by exploring who this person is that you’re trying to bring to life.

While I don’t think character questionnaires are the way to nail voice, they can be a good steppingstone in getting to know your character—because I don’t think you can capture a character’s voice until you fully know who they are.

Look at how the answers to a few key questions can change the type of person you’re dealing with.

What does your character do for a living?

A baker will have a different way of viewing the world than a plumber or a doctor. They’ll notice different things, use their own analogies, have unique priorities, behave differently in various situations. You’ll know they’re a baker not because the author has placed them in a kitchen wearing oven mitts but because they see ideas for new pastries in the shapes of flowers. They’ll think like a baker.

If you were to read a story in which all you got was oven mitts and cookie trays, you’d feel like you were reading something generic—because the author would not have captured a baker’s way of navigating the world.

How old is your character? What is their marital status?

A twenty-something single woman will have a different way of dealing with people than a fifty-something woman who’s just left a long, dull marriage. Or maybe the marriage was abusive: that would give her another voice. Or maybe she’s never been married, but her sister is in a happy marriage: different voice again. She’ll have to manage Valentine’s Day; she might get upset by seeing couples at candlelit tables for two in a restaurant.

Voice is all about the lens through which your character views the world. One of the most significant things that clarifies this lens is their goal: what do they want in the story? If someone wants respect, they’re going to act in certain ways and say certain things that will be very different from someone who’s out for revenge.

Where do they come from? What kind of family do they have? Wealthy or poor, loving or abusive? Are they the first-born of a large family, or are they the baby? Are they an only child?

Every answer creates a type of person who will act and react in diverse ways. Many of these actions and reactions won’t be conscious, but they’ll be there, and they’ll cement in place patterns of behavior that will (hopefully) cause that character all sorts of problems.

But answering those questions is only step one.

What Next?

Now, you have to put your characters into action: slip on their shoes and see the world through their eyes. Usually that means writing your way into the story in one form or another: by journaling in their voice, answering interview questions in their voice, or (my preference) simply throwing yourself into the story world and getting them moving.

This is why it’s so important to differentiate the narrative voice from the author’s voice. Unless the author is the narrator, they have no business speaking up. Your reader will have picked up a particular book to experience the world from the point of view of a female scientist in the 1960s (Lessons in Chemistry) or a college student in the classics who becomes enthralled with an eclectic group of students with whom he doesn’t quite fit in (The Secret History). The extent to which the author can deliver on that promise also turns out to be the extent to which they’ve captured the narrator’s way of seeing the world, which is… voice.

Why Voice Is So Important

Voice is not the only thing in a novel. But if you don’t nail it, you won’t have used point of view to its fullest potential, nor will you truly know your story—because you won’t know the main actors who are driving it forward. It won’t feel authentic, and your readers won’t feel the same emotional draw that they’ll experience when a character comes to life on the page and says, Let me show you what the world looks like through my eyes.

Isn’t that why we come to fiction in the first place?

MICHELLE BARKER - Resident Writing Coach

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and editor who lives in Vancouver, BC. Her newest book, coauthored with David Griffin Brown, is Story Skeleton: The Classics. They are also the authors of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. Her novel My Long List of Impossible Things, came out in 2020 with Annick Press. The House of One Thousand Eyes was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won numerous awards including the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have appeared in literary reviews world-wide.

Michelle holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and is a senior editor at The Darling Axe. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Michelle below. Michelle’s books

The post How Do You Find Your Narrator’s Voice? appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

What are writers chronically short on? Time.

There never seems to be enough of it as we try to get the next book written, research our publishing options, keep up with marketing, work on our platform, etc., and that doesn’t even factor in what’s happening in other areas of our life. And as we juggle, the one thing that can help us succeed more than anything else is often neglected: education to help us improve our storytelling skills.

Introducing Mini-Lessons

You guys know Becca and I have a lot to say about description and how showing the right things in the right way means readers are pulled in and will care deeply about characters and what’s happening in their lives. We’ve written books on many description elements and have even more of these in our THESAURUS database at One Stop for Writers.

This summer, Becca and I have recorded a mini lesson for each of our thesauruses, helping you better understand that story element, what its superpower is in your story, and how to activate that detail through description.

Each video takes you through a thesaurus in the One Stop for Writers database, but you don’t need to be a subscriber to benefit from these lessons or use our thesauruses (although they are very helpful for brainstorming). But if you are someone who uses them, this will broaden your understanding so you get even more value from each brainstorming list.

Bite-sized learning is a perfect match for busy writers

Life can be hectic, making it hard to carve out big blocks of time for learning. With these videos, you need about 5 (ish) minutes. Totally doable! Whether you want to learn how to describe a character’s emotions, activate the power of your scene’s setting, or understand character motivation better so plotting becomes easier, a helpful mini-lesson is waiting for you.

Here’s the playlist, or choose the topic you’d like to know more about below.

Happy writing and learning!

Grow Your Skills with Becca & Angela

How to Describe a Character’s Appearance

How Emotional Trauma Affects Characters & Their Arc

How to Use a Character’s Fears in Storytelling

How to Create a Character Readers Will Love

How to Give a Character Flaws that Will Hold Them Back

How the Right Setting Details Make a Scene More Powerful

How to Create a Memorable Character Using a Talent or Skill

How to Show What Your Character Is Feeling

How to Use Conflict to Power up Your Story

How to Write Your Theme and Use Effective Symbolism in Fiction

How to Use the Weather to Build Mood and Generate Conflict

How to Find the Right Job for a Character

How to Bring Readers Into a Story Using Textures

How to Create Vivid Description Using Colors and Patterns

How Describing an Object’s Shape the Right Way Strengthens the Story

How to Build Strong Characters & Arcs

How to Amplify Your Character’s Emotional State

Need more help as you plan, write, and revise? Join us at One Stop!

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Improve Your Storytelling in 5 Minutes appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Trigger warnings are often debated in the writing world. Some opine that readers should be warned if something potentially harmful is included in a book, and others feel the audience shouldn’t be bubble-wrapped and need to chin up if they want to read fiction. Like most things, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. 

It can be easy to scoff away the idea of “being triggered” if one has never experienced damaging trauma, or if they have, they were able to process it in a healthy way. The reality is that dealing with emotional trauma is 100% personal. Even people experiencing the exact same event will cope with it differently based on their personality, age, support system, past experiences, education, and a host of other factors. So, assuming everyone should react the same way is ill-informed. 

Where does this leave us, the authors? Ironically, in the same place had the trigger debate never occurred: we do our best to respect our readers, and use good judgment as we write. 

No matter how dark and gritty our fiction is, we should never be gratuitous, meaning we should only show what we need to, not more. Genres will vary, but even if you’re writing a torture scene, there’s no need to slap every scream, sensation, and sweat drop onto the page. Overdone description will kill the pace and the impact will be lost under a wall of sensory words. Just like any other scene, our description should be balanced, pulling readers in without overwhelming them. 

Here are a few ideas on how to handle potentially triggering content. 

Use Symbolism and Mood to Seed Hints

The back jacket copy should indicate some of what will unfold in the story and perhaps even allude to trauma your character experienced in the past. But you will still need to show a scene (or several) that portrays these wounding experiences. If you’re worried about triggering, then don’t have this event slam into the reader out of nowhere. Lay a few clues so readers can put emotional safeguards up if they need to. 

Mood, for example, is an excellent way to steer reader emotion. Weather, light and shadow, and universal symbolism can all help you nudge the reader toward the dark content about to be shown. Personal symbolism tied to the POV character can also lay the groundwork that something hurtful may be about to unfold: a sound, a smell, an object, a texture, a place that has specific meaning for the character. Including something that triggers their memory can help foreshadow something uncomfortable may be coming.

For example, if your character is about to be assaulted behind the restaurant where she works, take a moment to show her reluctance to take the garbage out. Maybe it’s because of the lack of alley lighting, or a memory surfaces of being surprised by a ranting homeless man who was digging in the trash another time she performed this chore. You could have her ease the door open and try and listen for hidden noises before venturing out to the bin. Or have an unpleasant odor hit her as she enters the dark. Symbolism and mood not only increase tension, they can give a subtle heads up that something significant is about to happen. 

Vary Your Narrative Distance

Deep POV is all the rage these days, but there are times when we shouldn’t use it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that emotionally difficult scenes should be reported rather than experienced from within the character’s shoes. I’m suggesting that you can pull readers in using deep POV to feel the intimate sensations and horror of the moment for a while and then zoom out to give them a break. A bit of filtering language (she thought, she smelled, he reached, he felt, it seemed, etc.) can achieve this as it adds distance. Or you could occasionally choose to name an emotion rather than show it in depth (NOTE: be careful with these techniques—always have a reason for using them or it will come across as lazy writing).

Weave In Facts (Telling) To Give a Break From Showing

Show, Don’t Tell implies “all or nothing,” but really this rule is meant to convey that writers should knowing WHAT to show (and when), and WHAT to tell. Deeply emotional scenes work best when there’s a good mix of show AND tell. Breaking up painful emotion and sensory detail with a few factual statements creates a balance, and if you need it to, will slide in a touch of distance so readers aren’t overwhelmed. 

A good example of this is the Hunger Games, when Peeta and Katniss are on the Cornucopia as a fellow tribute is being torn apart by genetically engineered dogs. Susanne Collins doesn’t describe every gore spray and tear although she could have (the book states this goes on for over an hour, because of course the game makers are all about putting on a show). Describing such a horrific scene in full would be gratuitous and most people would stop reading. As someone attacked by a dog as a child and dragged around in the snow, helpless, I know I would have. But Collins handled it well, using narrative distance, selective show and tell, and information to get the horror across without overdoing it. 

Only you can decide how close and personal you want to get with emotionally traumatic situations. It’s your story, your art. If you can justify to yourself what you need to show and why, you are respecting readers. It will feel authentic, not gratuitous, and they should respect your storytelling style in turn. 

How to Show the Impact of a Wound

The Emotional Wound Database at One Stop for Writers contains over 120 types of trauma a character might have experienced, including abandonment, injustices, betrayals, hardships, failures & mistakes, childhood trauma and more.

If you need help, each entry guides you to better understand how a character’s behavior and personality may change in the aftermath of a specific trauma, the fears that can emerge, and how their view of themselves and the world shifts.

Examples from this database:
Being Stalked
Telling the Truth and Not Being Believed
Accidentally Killing Someone
More emotional wounds

ANGELA ACKERMAN

Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.

The post Writing About Emotional Trauma Without Triggering Readers appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Until relatively recently, most stories were written with an omniscient point of view (POV), which follows the story and characters from an all-knowing distance. But over the past several decades, storytelling techniques have trended to a closer POV, focusing on one character and their experience at a time. In fact, for many genres, the expectation now is to use Deep POV for third-person stories, relating the story from within the POV character’s head (much like how we’d write first-person stories, just with different pronouns).

With the trends and expectations pushing toward a deeper POV, we might wonder if that means we should never drop out of Deep POV. What if we keep the POV “close” to one character’s experience, but relate some of the story from a shallower perspective that’s not so deep inside their head?

When might we want to use a shallower POV—and why?

Choosing POV: What’s the Point?

The POV we choose shapes readers’ perspective of the story, story events, and whatever message we’re trying to share. For example, the POV we choose affects a reader’s view of the cause-and-effect flow, narrative momentum, immersion strength, emotions of arcs at the scene level, what characters notice about situations, priorities of various story goals, etc.

So the question of when we should use Deep POV—and when we shouldn’t—comes down to which option will shape readers’ perspective the way we want. Will Deep POV help or hurt our intentions for the reader experience?

Because Deep POV usually creates a sense of immersion and emotional connection between the reader and the character, it’s gotten more popular over the years. However, for some situations, Deep POV won’t deliver the experience we want readers to have.

Deep POV, Immersion, and Emotional Connections

In general, the deeper the POV, the deeper the immersion—the sense that we’re not just reading words on a page but experiencing the story, right down to tandem visceral responses along with the POV character. Yet we also need to keep in mind that anything that takes readers out of the story disrupts that sense of immersion.

With Deep POV, readers also tend to feel a stronger emotional connection to the POV character, as they experience the story as the POV character. The story is told 100% subjectively, as readers learn of only the POV character’s thoughts and emotions, not those of the other characters. Readers are more likely to prioritize the same goals as the POV character and forgive any mistakes, as they have a deep understanding of the character’s secret longings and foibles. Yet sometimes that deep understanding of the POV character isn’t what we want for the story.

Obviously, this experiential style of POV requires a lot of showing rather than telling, in order to bring readers along the character’s journey, step by step. That’s why advice to increase our levels of showing often go hand-in-hand with the advice to use Deep POV, but showing isn’t always best for our storytelling.

If we understand how Deep POV, immersion, emotional connections, and showing are all linked, we can start to predict when Deep POV might not serve the experience we want for our readers.

When Might Deep POV Hurt a Reader’s Experience?

Here are five situations when we might want to use a shallower POV to create a better reader experience:

Situation #1: Avoid Reader Boredom

We’ll start with the most superficial situation: Telling vs. Showing. The advice to show more than tell often makes writers think that showing is better than telling. However, telling isn’t bad or something to be avoided.

For example, we wouldn’t want to use a lot of showing and Deep POV in a scene if the result would be boring, such as when it would be better to skip forward with a transition of time and/or place. Sure, the POV character might need to bring another character up to speed, but if that repeats a bunch of information the reader already knows, readers shouldn’t have to experience that repetition along with the character.

Tip: Briefly switching to a shallower POV to allow for a transition, perhaps with a telling-style summary of what the reader missed, can prevent reader boredom.

Situation #2: Share Future Knowledge with Readers

Most stories are written in “literary past tense”—rather than normal past tense—which means that story events are described as though they’re happening in the story present. However, some stories use normal past tense, which means that the events have already happened within the story itself.

Think of how in some stories, the narrator already knows how everything turns out. They might even interject with lines like: “I didn’t know it yet but…” or “If she’d only known, she would have…”

While many of these stories are told by a narrator sharing a tale from their past with a framing device, some instead simply use the technique of a shallower POV to include those types of lines. The story might briefly shift to a shallower POV to give a preview of events yet to come, as the story’s future already exists due to the use of normal past tense.

Whatever technique we use to include those types of lines, normal past tense adds distance to our storytelling, as those “If she’d only known” lines remind readers that they are reading a story. And unless our character is a fortune-teller, Deep POV doesn’t work for sharing future story knowledge.

Tip: For some stories, the normal past tense and a shallower POV for some lines makes sense if sharing future knowledge with readers is what we intend.

Situation #3: Limit an Emotional Connection to the POV Character

Wait…don’t we want readers emotionally connecting? Yes, but with some stories, we want to encourage readers to emotionally connect with the story itself or with other characters, not with the POV character of a scene.

For example, some stories include scenes from the villain’s perspective. Those scenes are sometimes written in a Deep POV style when the author wants to hide the villain’s identity, but in many other instances, the villain scenes are written in a slightly shallower POV than the rest of the story, as the author doesn’t want to encourage an emotional connection between readers and the villain.

In other stories, perhaps with a large cast of POV characters, it might make sense to encourage readers to connect to the overall story more than to any one character. Or those stories might start and end scenes with shallower POV to help ease the transition from one POV character to another.

Stories with an unreliable narrator might want to avoid readers feeling too betrayed when they learn their connection to the POV character wasn’t as close as they thought. So they might include selected details from a shallower and more objective perspective to give readers subtextual hints of the truth.

Tip: For some situations, we might want to discourage, or at least temporarily lessen, a reader’s emotional connection to a specific POV character by using a shallower POV in certain sections.

Situation #4: Tell the Story Beyond a Character’s Ability

Obviously, there are some stories where Deep POV doesn’t make sense at all, such as when the story we want to tell ranges beyond characters’ knowledge. However, there are some situations where most of the story is in Deep POV, but the POV character temporarily loses their ability to share the story experience with readers.

For example, if we want readers to know that our POV character is experiencing a dream, we might include a few lines with a shallower POV to transition into the dream. We might do something similar if a character is drugged or unconscious (or nearly so).

Or think of a scene where the POV character is emotionally numb, perhaps near catatonic. In that case, we might pull back the POV a bit so readers aren’t stuck in that numb situation with the character and we can give details that force the story’s narrative forward.

Tip: In some situations, we may want the storytelling to still feel like Deep POV, while we bend the “rules” of the technique a bit to move the story forward with a few shallower POV lines or details.

Situation #5: Maintaining Immersion Requires a Shallower POV

Above, I mentioned that Deep POV usually increases a reader’s sense of immersion. However, there are some instances when a Deep POV that creates a strong emotional connection with the POV character would overwhelm readers.

Think of a story where the POV character experiences such intense situations and/or emotions that the reader could feel uncomfortable. For example, extreme grief or sexual assault could make a reader pull back from the immersive experience to protect themselves from mental or emotional trauma.

In other words, some story situations can trigger readers to break immersion themselves. So if we want to maintain immersion, we might choose to use a shallower POV to prevent readers from feeling the need to pull back.

If readers already have the context for what the POV character is going through, the emotional connection can remain with a sense of sympathy, rather than the sense of empathy that a Deep POV might entail. As I’ve posted about before on my blog: The reader’s “flavor” of the emotion can be more powerful, intimate, and immediate than what they would experience if the author tried to tell them “here’s what this emotion feels like.”

Tip: In some situations, readers will feel a stronger emotional connection if we give them room with a shallower POV to experience their own reaction to events, rather than trying to match the reader’s emotional journey to the character’s experience.

Not Sure of the Best POV Choice?

As with most things writing-related, there’s no one “best” choice for our story’s POV. We need to keep in mind our goals for the story and the experience we want readers to have. The issue is also made even trickier by the fact that we’re not always writing in the POV style that we think we are.

One of the best things we can do to address all those concerns is to learn more about our POV choices, as well as the pros and cons of each style. By being informed, not only will we be able to make better POV choices, but we’ll also make sure any shifts from Deep POV to a shallower POV (or back again) are smooth enough to not cause speedbumps for readers. *smile*

Have you read stories that are primarily Deep POV but include some shallower POV sections? Did the technique work for you (and if not, why not)? Can you think of any other situations where a shallower POV section might make sense for a Deep POV story? Do you have any questions about shallow vs. Deep POV?

JAMI GOLD - Resident Writing Coach

Jami Gold put her talent for making up stuff to good use, such as by winning the 2015 National Readers’ Choice Award in Paranormal Romance for her novel Ironclad Devotion.

To help others reach their creative potential, she’s developed a massive collection of resources for writers. Explore her site to find worksheets—including the popular Romance Beat Sheet with 80,000+ downloads—workshops, and over 1000 posts on her blog about the craft, business, and life of writing. Her site has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Jami below.

The post Point of View: Is Deeper Always Better? appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

There are as many ways to tell a story as there are stories in existence. That means not all writing advice will be a good fit with the story we’re trying to tell.

An important step in knowing which advice to heed and which to ignore is being aware of the type of story we’re writing, specifically how we focus on the plot arc versus the character arc. So let’s talk about how we can discover our storytelling focus and what it means for our writing.

What Is Focus in Storytelling?

“Focus” refers to which arc—plot or character—gets more attention, has a bigger impact in our story, and/or is more closely tied to our story’s essence. Even if our story is fairly balanced, either our plot arc or our character arc is likely to have more of the focus in the story.

The focused arc might have a bigger influence on what the story feels like it’s about. Or it might involve a bigger overall change than the other arc. Or it might simply be the main thrust of the story while the other arc is more like a subplot.

• Plot-Focused:
  A balanced plot-focused story still includes a major character arc, but the character’s internal change doesn’t determine the direction or essence of the story as much as the plot does.
  In a heavily plot-focused story, the character’s internal/emotional journey (if it exists at all) is minor and might be triggered by a subplot rather than be tied to the main plot.
• Character-Focused:
  A balanced character-focused story still has a strong plot arc, but the essence of the story lies more in the character’s choices with those events and dilemmas.
  In a heavily character-focused story, plot events might exist just enough to help reveal the character’s issues and/or force them to change.

How Can We Tell Which Arc Has Focus in Our Story?

Obviously, we might be able to tell what type of story we have just by being in tune with our writing. But if we’re not sure—especially if our story is more balanced between the arcs—or if we want to verify that our draft matches our goals for the story, we can ask ourselves:

• When thinking about what made us want to write our story, do we think more about the cool plot events…or about our character’s emotional struggle?
• When describing our story to others, do we talk about what happens…or how events affect our character?
• Most importantly, which could we change more easily without affecting the essence of our story: our character’s choices and growth…or the plot events that cause our character’s struggle?

If we chose the first answer for each question above, our story is probably plot focused. But if we chose the second answer in each, our story is more likely to be character focused.

For example, if…

• our original inspiration was to write a story about a character overcoming addiction, and
• we describe our story through the lens of how they struggle with addiction, and
• we could easily change the plot details of their addiction (how they got hooked, the obstacles they face, etc.) without changing the essence of their struggle…

…then we probably intend to write a character-focused story. And once we know our answers, we should keep that intention in mind through our drafting, editing, and publication process.

Note, however, that if our answer to the third question doesn’t match the first two, our story draft may not be matching our intentions (unless our story is strongly balanced, in which case, that question can be difficult to answer). In case of a mismatch, though, we might need to step back and reanalyze our approach to the story.

How Can This Understanding Help Us?

In addition to being able to judge how well our story matches our intentions, knowing the focus can help us recognize when advice won’t apply to our story. If we have a plot-focused story, all the tip-filled blog posts and feedback suggestions about character arcs might not be helpful to us and might even make us question our writing skills.

On the other hand, if we have a character-focused story, all the advice about including a strong villain or antagonist plot might make us worry our story will be boring. In other words, we should give ourselves permission to ignore the advice that doesn’t apply to our style—unless we decide it works for the story we’re trying to tell.

Also, understanding the focus can help us approach our marketing for the story (including query or back-cover blurb). If we have a character-focused story, our book’s description might only need to include just enough plot detail to clarify the character’s struggles.

Or if we have a plot-focused story, we’d know not to spend many words on the character’s internal issues. Instead, we might just label their internal perspective in their character “tag” (cranky detective, hopeful student, etc.).

Of course, we can’t always control others’ expectations, so using the right marketing focus isn’t a guarantee to avoid reader disappointment. (Check out my companion post to this one on how the new Dune movie by Denis Villeneuve is an interesting example of a character-focused story that was expected by some to be more plot focused.) In most cases, however, our marketing is the best way to lead reader expectations in the direction we want.

Our story is unique, and we don’t want to feel pressured to follow guidance that doesn’t fit the story we’re trying to tell. With the right understanding of our story, we’ll know when to listen to others’ advice and when to listen to our own instincts. *smile* Do you have any questions or insights about storytelling focus and how a better understanding could help our writing (and publishing) process?

JAMI GOLD - Resident Writing Coach

Jami Gold put her talent for making up stuff to good use, such as by winning the 2015 National Readers’ Choice Award in Paranormal Romance for her novel Ironclad Devotion.

To help others reach their creative potential, she’s developed a massive collection of resources for writers. Explore her site to find worksheets—including the popular Romance Beat Sheet with 80,000+ downloads—workshops, and over 1000 posts on her blog about the craft, business, and life of writing. Her site has been named one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Jami below.

The post What’s Your Story’s Focus? Plot vs. Character Arcs appeared first on WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®.

Those of you who are familiar with me know that Angela Ackerman and I talk a lot about emotion. A LOT.

That’s because we believe that clearly conveying emotion—particularly that of the protagonist or viewpoint character—plays an important role in building reader empathy. If we can build a strong connection for the reader, they’ll become invested in the character and be more likely to keep reading.

The other reason character emotion is so important is that it draws the reader into the story. If we’re able to show emotion well, we heighten the reader’s experience; instead of them sitting back and being told about the character’s emotions, they’re feeling them as the story goes along. They’re invited to share in the journey.

That level of engagement is critical if we’re going to pull readers into our stories and keep them there.

Quick Recap: How to Show a Viewpoint Character’s Emotion

Here’s an example of character emotion that has been shown, taken from the 2nd Edition of the Emotion Thesaurus:

JoAnne sat on the chair’s edge, spine straight as a new pencil, and stared into Mr. Paxton’s face. Sixteen years she’d given him—days she was sick, days the kids were sick—making the trip back and forth across town on that sweaty bus. Now he wouldn’t even look at her, just kept fiddling with her folder and pushing around the fancy knickknacks on his desk. Maybe he didn’t want to give her the news, but she wasn’t gonna make it easy for him.

Mr. Paxton cleared his throat for the hundredth time. The vinyl of JoAnne’s purse crackled and she lightened her grip on it. Her picture of the kids was in there and she didn’t want it creased.

“JoAnne…Mrs. Benson…it appears that your position with the company is no longer—”

JoAnne jerked to her feet, sending her chair flying over the tile. It hit the wall with a satisfying bang as she stormed out of the office.

Through a combination of body language, thoughts, and reactions, we can see what JoAnne is feeling without her ever stating it outright. And because we’ve also learned something about who she is and where she’s coming from, our empathy is piqued. So showing emotion for our protagonist pays off in spades.

But How Do I Show Emotions for Other Characters?

That example may not be news to you, since the importance of showing emotion has been discussed quite a bit. What hasn’t been talked much about is how to convey the feelings of a non-viewpoint character (NVPC).

Unless you’re writing in omniscient viewpoint, you’ll need to stick closely to your main character’s point of view and won’t be able to share what’s happening internally for anyone else. So how do you convey the emotions of the other people in your story?

Technique #1: Outer Manifestations

When you’re in the main character’s head, you can’t access the thoughts and internal sensations of other cast members to show what they’re feeling. But you can use the outer manifestations of their emotions because the viewpoint character will be able to notice those.

In the example above, we can tell that Mr. Paxton is uncomfortable, maybe even nervous, about giving JoAnne the news. We know this because of what the viewpoint character is able to observe: the fiddling with knickknacks and his frequent clearing of the throat.

When we’re revealing the emotion of a NVPC, we can’t utilize all the same techniques that we could for the protagonist, but we can use the ones that are noticeable by others, such as:

• body language
• facial expressions
• vocal shifts
• changes in posture and personal space

Technique #2: The Viewpoint Character’s Response

Mr. Paxton’s fussing and throat clearing aren’t enough to show exactly what he’s feeling because they could represent numerous things, such as restlessness, excitement, or nervousness. But JoAnne’s response to these clues clarifies his state.

Through her thoughts, we learn that her boss is reluctant to give her the news; that information provides some much-needed context to help us understand what Mr. Paxton is feeling. Thoughts can work well to show the viewpoint character’s response; so can body language and the decisions they make during or following an interaction.

Technique #3: Dialogue and Vocal Cues

When we’re feeling emotional, one of the ways it comes through is in our speech patterns. Sometimes this can be shown through vocal cues (changes in pitch, tone, speed of speech, word usage, etc.), such as Mr. Paxton’s hesitations.

It can also be shown through the words themselves—say, if a character is ranting about the events leading up to his current emotional state. The reader will be able to combine this verbal context with the nonverbal body language to figure out what emotion is being felt.

Technique #4: Avoidances

If a NVPC’s emotions are uncomfortable ones, this can lead them to avoid certain things associated with them: a person, a place, a situation, specific questions, or a topic of conversation.

One of the clues to Mr. Paxton’s emotional state is his procrastination—how he’s putting off the difficult job of letting JoAnne go. She’s been sitting there a while, long enough to get pretty worked up as she watches him dither. His avoidance of the conversation itself shows a high level of discomfort, putting his emotional state into perspective for the reader.

Technique #5: Fight, Flight, or Freeze Reactions

When a character feels threatened, certain emotions will come into play. In these situations, a character may get confrontational, beat a hasty exit, or turn into the proverbial deer in the headlights.

Just as real-life people have a fight, flight, or freeze response to threatening scenarios, characters should, too. If you know which way your character leans, you can write their reactions in a way that readers (who are familiar with these responses) will be able to identify the emotion at work.

Technique #6: Changes to the Character’s Baseline

One vital part of writing emotion well is doing some research beforehand to figure out your character’s emotional range. This enables you to write him or her consistently throughout the story.

Then, when something happens that impacts their emotions, they’ll deviate from that norm, and readers will notice the shift. Changes in the voice, speech patterns, body language, how the character interacts with or responds to others, new avoidances—anything that alters their typical behavior can become a red flag for readers, letting them know that emotions are in flux.

As you can see, you have a lot of resources when it comes to writing the emotions of non-viewpoint characters. Some of them can work in isolation, but many of them should be used in tandem to help clarify things for the reader.

Use some visible body language while also noting the viewpoint character’s response to it. Show the character’s avoidance along with a persistent vocal cue to make the emotion clear. Use a flight response to a seemingly unthreatening situation along with a bit of dialogue to shed some light on what’s happening.

With a combination of these techniques, you’ll be able to paint a complete picture of any non-viewpoint character’s emotions without hopping heads and pulling readers out of the story.

For more information on showing character emotion effectively, check out the 2nd edition of The Emotion Thesaurus and this list of resources.

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

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As writers, fusing our protagonist with the reader creates the ultimate reading experience. Teacher and writer John Gardener referred to this as “the fictional dream.” It’s a state the reader reaches whereby they feel as though they are inside the story, inside the character’s skin, going through events themselves. Achieving this dream-like state is difficult, while undermining it is surprisingly easy to do. But there are three simple tricks you can utilize that increase the odds of drawing your reader into a literary dream from which they won’t want to wake up.

Remove Filter Verbs

If our goal as writers is to allow the reader to experience our stories as though they ARE our characters, then filter verbs are the enemy. Filter verbs (sometimes called distancing verbs) are sensory verbs like look, smell, hear, taste, feel, think. (Note: variations on these words also count, such as see, listen, notice, wonder, etc.).

They look harmless, right? But these words subtly remind the reader that the character’s eyes are doing the seeing, or their brain is doing the thinking, or their heart is doing the feeling. They subtly tell the reader, psst, this isn’t actually your story. Take a look at the following examples, paying attention to the underlined filter verbs and how they can be removed:

Example: He smelled maple syrup and thought of the last time Dad took him to breakfast.
Instead, try: The sweetness of maple syrup took him back to that booth at the diner, sitting across from Dad.

Example: She peered into her boss’ empty office and wondered why he was gone so much lately.
Instead, try: Her boss’ office was empty yet again.

See the difference? We are inside the characters’ senses in a far more bold and confident way. And yes, the latter examples are harder to write. They require intention. But we must trust the reader to understand that the filter verbs are implied and bring them into the character’s viewpoint.

Note: those examples are both in third-person POV, which is harder to imbue with immediacy and intimacy. But as you can see, it’s worth the effort. There’s room for your reader to feel as though they are in the moment, behind the character’s senses and inside their brain and heart.

Eliminate Time Words

Another way we often gently sabotage ourselves and say, “Hey reader, the narrator is talking to you,” is by using time words. Yes, it’s important to orient your reader with passage-of-time phrases, particularly when there’s a gap in time to account for (the next day, later that evening, the following week, etc.). But in terms of time movement within an active scene, consider cutting words like then, next, after that, finally, and when. Time words are often implied because sentences are linearly structured. They add unnecessary clunk and they subtly send the message the narrator is telling the reader what happened and in what order. Just like the previous examples, time words are underlined below:

Example: When they climb into the car, their face is scrunched up in anger.
Instead, try: They climb into the car with their face scrunched up in anger.

Example: As soon as I walk into the house, I jog upstairs and then answer my phone.
Instead, try: I walk into the house, jog upstairs, and answer my phone.

Minimize Internal Dialogue

Notice how I said minimize—not cut—internal dialogue. Novels can and should include internal dialogue. There are times where, without it, the reader would be lost. Confused. Dying to understand how a character is feeling. Or desperate to know what the character is thinking. Internal dialogue oftentimes is the window that affords the crucial meaning of how the character is making sense of what’s happening around them.

But it’s important to imagine your scenes like a coil that you are working to tighten, word by word. Each time we step away from dialogue or external action, that coil threatens to lose tension. Working with editing clients, I often see internal dialogue sending a subtle signal that says, “Here, let me do the thinking and analyzing and feeling for you, dear reader.” 

Some questions to ask as you reevaluate your own usage of internal dialogue:

*It is otherwise impossible to show what’s been told via action and/or dialogue?

*Does it let us know feelings or thoughts the character is hiding from everyone else?

*Is it brief?

That last one is crucial. The longer internal dialogue goes, the more that coil you work to tighten starts to unwind. Author Tim Wynne Jones has referred to long swaths of internal dialogue as Pause Button Violations. Within an active scene, it’s as though the author hits the pause button on all action and dialogue to allow for the internal dialogue. The pause is unnaturally long given the fact that it sits inside an active scene, and can oftentimes be done in a far shorter way or be done using dialogue and action on the page instead.

Consider combing your manuscript in search of these three fictional dream killers. Once you pull them out, you’ll have a far better chance of reeling your reader in.

MARISSA GRAFF - Resident Writing Coach

Marissa has been a freelance editor and reader for literary agent Sarah Davies at Greenhouse Literary Agency for over seven years. In conjunction with Angelella Editorial, she offers developmental editing, author coaching, and more. Marissa feels if she’s done her job well, a client should probably never need her help again because she’s given them a crash-course MFA via deep editorial support and/or coaching. Find out more about our RWC team here and connect with Marissa below.

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