Do you feel emotion? Are you an “emotional” person? Do you wear your heart on your sleeve? Do people criticise you for being “too emotional”? Depending upon your cultural background, the level of acceptable emotions will vary greatly. But, by the time we become adults, we’ve come some way to controlling our emotions within those cultural boundaries. Well, hopefully.
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Encouragement in pain
During a recent sermon on encouraging each other in our faith, the minister said something that really landed with me. When we comfort others who are going through difficult times, rather than using platitudes or our own words, why not use the words of our Lord? He has experienced everything that we are experiencing, and He understands what we are going through.
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Finding their voice
Of recent times, I’ve been critiquing the work of a range of writers—from first timers to the multi-published. What is often the difference between me slogging through, and wanting to read more, is the characterisation. If you’ve been following along, you know this blog harps on about character. But something happened that made me remember the importance of character voice.
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Omissions, fibs and outright fantasy
Unless a fairy doomed you from birth to only tell the truth (like Tomas in Power of a Princess) you are a constant liar. Just like me and everyone else in the world. The interesting thing about lies is that most of us think we are honest—we underestimate how often we lie to protect our self-esteem. This means that your characters need to be liars too. But just like us, our characters always lie for a reason. And just like us, they often don’t realise they’re doing it!
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