You’d have to be living as a hermit, St. Anthony style, to not know there’s a polarisation of viewpoints at present. Friendships, customers, and family relationships have been lost. Dinner conversations have become tense. Rather than lament this, I think it is an opportunity for writers for several reasons.
Read moreEmotion is character
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.
Read moreFinding 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.
Read moreUnity of opposites
An element of literature and film I find a lot of fun is the power of two completely opposite characters being brought together by a common event or goal. Once there, they find themselves in a scenario where they want precisely the opposite things.
Read moreTropes and artistic license
As a writer of romantic suspense, and more recently inspirational romantic suspense, tropes come with the territory for me. There are some I like more than others. But the beauty of a trope is that the reader knows what they’re going to get.
Read moreMonsters, villains & antiheros
As I embark on writing my first psychological thriller, I have been thinking a lot about the role of monsters and antiheroes in modern story telling. With so many anti-heroes in our popular culture, like Walter White, Martin Byrde and Amy Dunne, have these morally questionable protagonists replaced villains and monsters for good?
Read moreThe persistence of time
This week I had a message from a lost friend. You know how it is—people come and go from your life. He’s a good 10 years older than me, so I was practically a kid when we last met. Our conversation had me thinking about just how much people change yet stay the same. We hadn’t talked in 20 years, but we fell back into the easy conversation we had all those years ago.
Read moreOmissions, 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!
Read morePsychology and realism
I once had a friend who decided he was going to change careers. He dreamed of abandoning his spreadsheets to become a psychiatrist. He couldn’t see anything more worthwhile in life than discovering the inner workings of humans. I agreed. But gee, it takes around 11 years to get qualified. Sounds like a long time, doesn’t it? Crazy decision (pun intended).
Read moreIntrospective reverse engineering
My current WIP is a novel rewrite with some specific goals in mind. The primary issue to fix is a distinct lack of introspection. This has completely thrown out the pacing which unfortunately means the suspense is not as, well, suspenseful as it might be.
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