After a week off to recover from bronchitis, I am back to share a great post from Live Write Thrive guest author Dawn Field. This post gives you some tips on how to evoke the feelings you want in your writing without using too many words. Read it, and see what I mean.
Today’s guest post is by Dawn Field: The best books suck you into an alternative world in a single sentence. Ideally, it happens in the opening sentence. Some take a paragraph—others longer. …
I’ve picked this post from Jane Friedman as this Sunday’s reblog because I’ve already found it personally helpful and have passed it onto one of my authors, who is working on his second self-published title. There is a lot to learn as a self-published author, and this handy checklist can help.
This customizable checklist guides your self-publishing project to completion, to ensure you don’t miss any important steps.
This year, take your writing resolutions beyond wishful maybes and make them happen. Here are five ways you can make better writing resolutions this year.
This is a very informative article on the differences between showing and telling and the gradations of each. There are great examples of how to use this knowledge to improve your fiction mindfully.
Should your characters change during your story? The state of your the actors in your plot can drive your story or make it stagnant. This excerpt from an older post at WritersDigest.com is worth another look. Read on.
4 Ways to Motivate Characters and Plot
Some of your characters will change during the course of your story—let’s call them changers. Others—stayers—will not change significantly in personality or outlook, but their motivations may nonetheless change as the story progresses from situation to situation. Both changers and stayers can have progressive motivations.
Confused? Don’t be; it’s simpler than it may seem. Characters come in four basic types:
By Nancy Kress
Characters who never change, neither in personality nor motivation. They are what they are, and they want what they want.
Characters whose basic personality remains the same; they don’t grow or change during the story. But what they want changes as the story progresses (“progressive motivation”).
Characters who change throughout the story, although their motivation does not.
Characters who change throughout the story as their motivation also progresses.
When you know the key motivation(s) behind your character and plot, you can write scenes that not only make sense to you and your readers, but also add depth to your story. Because character and plot are intertwined, we’ll refer to the above four as character/plot patterns. Let’s further explore each one.
What are your favorite ways to balance your characters and their motivation to keep your story moving forward? Do you prefer them to be static or dynamic?
