Say what you mean, and mean what you say. This is good advice for being a better human, but terrible advice for writing good characters. Initial drafts often suffer from dialogue in which characters tell each other exactly what they mean, without conflict or subtext.
As you revise and discover what your characters really want in each conversation, what’s frustrating or thwarting them, what they feel they can’t risk revealing or facing at that point in the story—you can craft great dialogue, and better scenes, by holding back a bit of what characters really think and feel. This simple shift adds layers to your characters, and essential subtext to your dialogue.
Read more...Kurt Vonnegut famously said: Every character should want something, even if it’s a glass of water.
It’s a simple concept: Give your character a desire. That advice has been largely translated to goal. Give your character a goal.
This classic writing advice gets lost in translation when it gets associated only with book-level goals. For example: My character is broke, trapped in a loveless marriage in a foreign country and just wants to make it home.
Goal: Get Home. A good, noble, goal! But this is a book-level goal. This is what the character wants to achieve by the end of the book. Catch the killer. Solve the mystery. Get the guy.
Book-level goals are essential, but not the only “goal” a successful character needs.
Read more...This summer (2025) marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. National Geographic released a documentary: Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.
Anyone can tell you that the iconic movie is about a shark that terrorizes a beachside town.
That’s the central conflict. So, it was fascinating to hear director Steven Spielberg say:
It’s about home. Longing for home, getting home, returning home, already being home.
Read more...In prior posts, I've argued that it can be helpful to think of backstory (past narrative summarized within present scene events) as interiority.
That’s because backstory, along with imagination and future anticipation, are all a part of a POV character’s thought process and rationale.
Thoughts alone don’t create interiority. Interiority is a process.
proc·ess
/ˈpräËŒses/
noun
- a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.
The interiority process is an art, not a formula, but the concept is relatively straightforward:
Read more...Fully dimensional characters have history! They have a unique perspective on the world that they developed from past experiences.
Few modern stories begin with a character’s birth—Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead a recent notable exception. Of course, Kingsolver had clear thematic and structural reasons why to begin at birth, but that’s a post for another time :)
The vast majority of books follow Matt Bird’s advice: Your story isn’t about your character’s life, it’s about their problem.
Plot and story drive focus on a present problem. The point of view (POV) character makes sense of present story circumstances (their developing problem) based on their unique history of past events.
Compelling story characters make things worse for themselves based on a false or self-protective belief they’ve developed because of past events—often referred to as the “lie,” stemming from the “wound.”
Modern books tend not to start with the development of the character’s wound(s) and subsequent lie, but with the effect the lie has on the character as the story opens.
As the story progresses, backstory that pertains to a character's lie develops.
The question of how to incorporate past events into a present timeline is a question that confounds most writers—at first.
Read more...Time to talk interiority! So much energy in early drafts goes into external events, i.e. what happens in a novel or memoir.
External events = things that could be acted out on stage, like dialogue, and action.
It’s an incredible amount of work to get down the external flow of events in your book. External events are the perfect thing to focus on in beginning drafts.
But when you go to revise, don’t fall into the common trap of polishing sentences that only add to the external story.
What happens only matters as much as the context and meaning a character (or former self in memoir) gives to those story events. Interiority provides that context and meaning.
Read more...In my last post, I wrote about how a PET Sentence Journal can help get a broader sense of writing that strikes you as Persuasive, Evocative, or True.
Someone pointed out that the “E” could stand for “Entertaining.”
Absolutely! Any sentence that delights you, any writing that grips your breath with admiration and envy, that makes you think: I want to do that.
In our favorite books, sentences that strike us generally gain power from context – where and how the sentence is placed, how it relates to the character, their story arc, and the book’s theme.
In this post, I want to talk nuts and bolts of building context at the scene level.
I’m a big proponent of keeping a “PET Sentence Journal,” a simple practice you can do as a reader to become a better writer.
PET stands for: Persuasive, Emotive, True.
All you have to do is jot down published sentences that move you.
You might already underline in books or highlight in Kindle, but I suggest going a step further to write out sentences you admire in a dedicated journal/document.
I’ll explain how this practice helps deepen your craft with a couple of PET Sentences I pulled from All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.
Read more...When I read, I’m always on the lookout for craft, narrative technique, and story fundamental examples I can share with writers.
So, I was delighted during a recent breakfast chat with author Suzette Mullen, when she articulated a beautiful example of her books’ Take Aways.
Naming your book’s Take Away aka Point aka Controlling Idea aka Main Theme aka Story Guiding Principle can act as a lighthouse-in-the-fog as you write and revise, but this enormously helpful story fundamental is often misunderstood or overlooked.
No wonder, with so much confusing terminology! But it all boils down to one powerful tool for the author.
Read more...Every genre needs "stakes."
The term often brings action and thriller books to mind, so developing the stakes in "quieter" genres such as literary fiction and memoir can get overlooked.
Stakes simply refer to what is at risk for the protagonist. Any story event immediately becomes more riveting to readers when the stakes are on the page.
So how do writers develop literary stakes on the page?
