How to Create Dynamic Fictional Characters

A Writer's Path

by David Gittlin

Most serious writers want to connect with an audience; preferably a big one.  You have something to say.  You have a story to tell.  You want people to read it.  One of the best ways to make people want to read your work is to create memorable and relatable central characters.  Whether you are writing a short story, screenplay, or a novel, you want your readers to identify with and live the story through your main characters.  To do this, you have to create three dimensional characters that live and breathe in your reader’s imagination.  I’d like to share with you a method I learned for from professional, published writers.

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Writers Need to Rethink Rewrites

7 Tips to Being Dramatic . . . In Fiction

Legends of Windemere

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Adding drama into your writing can be tough and many are leery about adding this due it skewing toward the negative.  Yet, it’s fairly unavoidable if you sit down and consider what can be born from it.  We may even add it without realizing what we’re doing.  There are days I think we all have different views and definitions of drama.  Some people consider it a genre while others call it a literary tool.  So, are there any tips that can cross every genre and be seen as universal?

1. Drama tends to be seen as highly emotional, which means it can be the cornerstone of conflict.  When a person or character goes through change, they have emotions that guide them just as much as thoughts.  This is part of their growth, so we have to consider this in our writing.  Without this type of drama, the characters…

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9 Powerful Secrets That Will Supercharge Your Fiction…

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

by Ruth Harris  on Anne R Allen Site:

Shhh!

Secrets.

Everyone has them.

Every book must have at least one because secrets are the jet-powered engine that propels fiction forward. Ever notice how many blurbs in the daily BookBub email include the word secret?

Secrets provide motivation, plot, character, even a setting (a haunted house, anyone?) From Madame Bovary to Carrie, from Rebecca to Big Little Lies, from thrillers to romance, from mystery to women’s fiction to sci-fi, every story revolves around a secret.

Secrets ripple outward and can produce unexpected consequences a writer can take advantage of. Secrets need to be protected, denied, defended, and excused. This means they will have predictable (and unforeseen) consequences. These consequences will affect the people who guard them, excuse them, or wilfully blind themselves to their existence.

People with secrets are good at keeping them—until they’re not—or else until some…

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Sally’s Cafe and Bookstore – Author Update – D.G. Kaye, Adele Marie Park and Malia Ann Haberman

Sally’s Cafe and Bookstore – Author Update -Tina Frisco, Bette A. Stevens and Sue Coletta

EDITING 101: 48 – Using Quotes in Your Book and Research Tips – Part 1…

Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

Originally posted as the Dun Writin’—Now Whut? series on this blog, EDITING 101 is a weekly refresher series for some of you and brand new for others.

Courtesy ofAdirondack Editing

Using Quotes in Your Book and Research Tips (Part 1)

As often as I run into authors wanting to use song lyrics in their novels, I also run into authors wanting to use quotes in their non-fiction books. (If you missed the post about using song lyrics in your manuscript, you can find it HERE 101:08) It seems that many authors like the way somebody else said something previously and don’t think they can say it any better.

Well, I don’t know about that. But I do know that you cannot simply take someone else’s words—no matter how wonderfully written—and plop them into your for-sale book. That’s plagiarism. And, you cannot simply use a significant amount of material…

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Guest Post by Mystery Author Carrie Cross – Advice for Aspiring Writers

Carrie Cross’s Advice to Aspiring Writers #4: Plot From the End

One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever read regarding plotting was from Ayn Rand’s, The Art of Fiction. Her premise suggests that an author must plan the climax in advance, and figure out the end of their story before they ever begin to write.

Some authors like to start with an outline, diagramming their whole book scene-by-scene. This structure doesn’t work for me. I find that it inhibits my creativity if I have to force dialogue, plot twists, and suspense into a prearranged outline. However, I made the mistake of starting my first novel with some juicy, creative ideas, but with no plan for where I was going with them. Why don’t I just let my imagination see where it takes the characters? I thought gleefully, and foolishly. What I ended up with was 400 pages of what I now refer to as “a tangled ball of spaghetti” that took months to unravel. That manuscript never turned into a coherent book.

And that’s because I didn’t know where I was going from the beginning. I started exploring a path without having any idea where it would end. I had the idea for a story, but I didn’t plan the climax, the finale, the de·noue·ment:
ˌdāno͞oˈmäN/
1. the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.

Ayn Rand’s advice on plotting was invaluable to me when I wrote my next book, which was the first volume of the Skylar Robbins detective series: The Mystery of Shadow Hills. This time I had the idea for my story, decided how it would end, and planned the climax in advance. And then I wrote toward it.

Every scene, every character, and every bit of dialogue was composed with the end in sight. If you don’t know where the end of the road lies, how can you possibly figure out the path that will lead you to it? As Ayn Rand says in The Art of Fiction, “The only absolute rule is-you must start plotting from the end.”

Places you can find the awesome Detective Skylar Robbins:

Amazon Kindle

Barnes and Noble

itunes

http://www.carrie-cross.com

Thank you for the fabulous post, Carrie! :)