Tag Archive - Emotions

The 3 Ways to Show Emotion in Your Characters

This month I’m launching my new online video course: Emotional Mastery for Fiction Writers.

Let me just share a tiny bit of what you’ll learn in the more than six hours of intense instruction.

One of the most important emotional components of a novel or short story is the showing of emotion in a character. It’s not easy to do well. Often writers cram in tons of body sensations and physical tells, hoping to get the emotion across. But that is overkill.

What’s needed is masterful description of “showing emotion” in addition to revealing a character’s thoughts.

Utilizing body language should be minimal, original, and targeted, for best effect.  Continue Reading…

The Connection between Character Emotion and Reader Empathy

Today’s guest post is by Becca Puglisi.

Do you know how many books are on the market today? Neither do I; I can’t count that high. I do know that in 2015 alone, over a million books were published.

This is awesome for readers, but it creates a problem for authors looking to create a fan base. Not only do we need customers to find our books, we need them to love them—enough to finish them and go on to consume everything else we have to offer.

To make it in this crowded space, we need to attract readers who are obsessed with our work. We want them staying up late and oversleeping because they couldn’t put our book down, texting friends to tell them how awesome it is, and running to the computer when they’re done to see if there are more coming out.

Basically, we want raving fans—customers who read all of our stuff and do the word-of-mouth marketing for us. But how do we get this kind of response to our books? Continue Reading…

What’s Really Happening When You Think You Are Lazy

Today’s guest post is by Johannah Bogart.

I work with writers who get stuck while finishing their books. They explain it away by saying they are lazy. If they would just stop being lazy, according to them, they’d finish the book.

I don’t believe laziness exists. It is a label that shields us from our fears. With one client** I had, calling herself lazy was protecting her from having to face traumatic scenes from her marriage she knew she would be writing about.

With another, this mask of laziness was protecting her from facing another potential failure. She had already written a book that did not garner the reception she expected. Now, halfway through her second book, she thought her lack of motivation to finish meant she was lazy.

In a session, I asked her to sit quietly with herself and ask the question: “What does my laziness want for me that is positive?”
The client responded that her laziness wanted her to avoid being disappointed again. It wanted to protect her identity as being a good writer, which already felt partially taken from her. Continue Reading…

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