Tag Archive - characters

Settings in Your Novel That Work As Triggers

man pushing rock

I’m going to interrupt my post today with a commercial break. The Write to Done contest for the top ten best writers’ blogs is now open for recommendations. If you have been benefiting from and enjoying Live Write Thrive this year, would you please take ONE minute to vote for this blog? It will help bring more readers to the blog and will make me feel really good!

Here’s the link at Write to Done. I want to thank the thousands of subscribers and all those who have been sending me kind comments and supporting all the posts I’ve been sharing and tweeting about all year. I do this all out of a love to teach writing and helping novelists write the best book they can. Thanks so much for your support! Now back to your regularly scheduled program . . .

When choosing settings for your scenes, you want to think about the kinds of places that will allow the emotions, needs, dreams, and fears of your characters to come out. Certain places will trigger these things to come to the surface and will stir memories. Your character has a past, and even if she never visits any of the places in her past in your novel, other places can draw out feelings and memories. This happens to us all the time. Continue Reading…

Setting Your Characters in the Proper Setting

man holding onto signpost

During this year of delving into the heart of your story, I’ve only touched a little on setting. I haven’t been ignoring the topic, although by now you may have been wondering about that. Setting is so important to your book, and all too often writers practically ignore it in their quest to unveil a great plot or take the reader on a character’s journey.

But stop and think for a moment about yourself and the world you live in. Each moment you’re alive, you are interacting with your setting. At times, where you are is inconsequential and unimportant to what is going on in your life at that moment. You could be in a coffee shop, at the top of a mountain, or waiting at the dentist’s office to get your teeth cleaned and it wouldn’t matter in respect to what you may be going through, feeling, thinking, or desiring at the time. Much of our lives we are in mundane places, doing mundane things.

But do readers want to read about that? Do you recall what I said months ago about books that portray ordinary people? I said ordinary people are boring—and so are mundane, boring settings. No one wants boring. Continue Reading…

Create Key Moments with Secondary Characters

woman in bubble

Before we move away from characters for a while, I’d like to get you thinking a bit more about those secondary characters. My aim in this blog is to help you zoom in on the heart of your story, and in last week’s post I gave a scenario that showed how you can make your protagonist and supporting character clash by having their goals, needs, and fears be opposites to some degree. That’s just one way you can not only bring your secondary characters to life but also enhance your overall theme. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m big on themes, and I believe books with well-explored themes can have great impact on the reader. So as you consider your secondary characters and create their lives and personalities, think of a problem they come to face as the book unfolds that will tie in with the theme. Continue Reading…

Page 1 of 512345»