Sympathetic Characters Part 2: Suffering

When it comes to feeling sympathy, our emotion are hardwired to be triggered by the distress of others.

It can be tempting to avoid putting your characters (especially the ones you like) in too much pain and agony. Whether physical or mental, any kind of suffering can feel like a betrayal of characters you’ve become very fond of.

Unfortunately, if you don’t put them through the wringer their problems will seem minor and not worth worrying about.

Read more »

Sympathetic Characters Part 1: Danger

This first part of this series on creating emotional attachment between readers and characters is going to look at engendering sympathy, and in this particular post, by putting characters in risky situations. If you want the reader to feel concern for the characters in your story, putting them in danger is a simple way to do it.

Any time something of value is on the line, how the situation plays out will be of interest, and that is true for all the parties involved. But if you can communicate what’s at stake and make the reader as keen to avoid that outcome as the character, then it will amplify the level of interest in what happens next.

Read more »

Forcing Readers To Like Characters

The story you’re writing may have the kind of lead character that people automatically root for. He may be a good guy doing the right thing; or a decent woman trying to sort out something that needs sorting. Heroic behaviour and overcoming adversity can bypass the whole need to tell the reader this is someone to cheer on. It’s obvious.

But they might be a little more complex than that. Maybe flawed, maybe even a bit awkward. Or they may not get to their heroic moment until much later in the story. How do you get the reader on board as quickly as possible without having to add ‘stick with it, things get good later’ at the bottom of each page?

Read more »

2013 For Book Lovers

Sometimes I’m reading an ebook and I’d like to flip forward and see how many more pages till the end of the chapter. But I can’t.

Or I might be on a train and see someone reading their Kindle or Nook, and I wonder what book they’re reading. Bu there’s no way to tell.

Then I pull out  up my own Kindle from the inside pocket of my jacket, with over a hundred books on it, and a bunch of comics, and even a couple of WIPs, and I think, it’s probably a fair exchange.

Read more »

Let Characters Be Wrong

Nobody likes a perfect character. Someone who is super good at everything and gets everything right is annoying. 

Even the most suave secret agents of indestructible superheroes need to make mistakes in order to make the story interesting.  

There are two parts to using wrongness in a story. There’s the actual mistake (which sometimes isn’t known to be a mistake at the time), and there’s the consequences of the mistake, usually forcing the character to deal with powerful feeling of guilt or regret.

Read more »

Most Popular Posts Of The Year

Well, the world didn't end so I guess we'll be doing it all again next year. Thanks to everyone who dropped by over the last twelve months, and especially those who left comments. 

To round off the year, here are Moody Writing's top ten most popular posts of 2012 (based on page views):

Read more »

Dialogue Tags Are Annoying

Most people know how to add dialogue tags at the end of dialogue to identify who’s speaking.

"Look at me,” said Malcolm.

And sometimes instead of using dialogue tags, we use action tags.

“Look at me.” Malcolm waved his hands over his head.

Both indicate who’s speaking, but the difference, although small, is important. The dialogue ends with a comma in one and a full stop (period) in the other.

Not so hard to figure out. But sometimes we don’t want to put the tag at the end of the dialogue, we want to put it somewhere in the middle. And that’s where the fun starts.

Read more »

Different Characters, Different Beliefs

In order to make a scene between two characters feel interesting it needs some degree of conflict. That’s fine if one character happens to be a cop and the other a robber, but the story isn’t always going to present you with directly oppositional characters like that.

But even if the characters in a scene don’t have anything to fight over and the scene isn’t highly charged or full of high stakes, you can still give characters something to clash over.

Read more »

Assume Reader Resistance

There’s always the feeling when you write something that maybe no one else will want to read it. And that’s exactly how you should think.

Sure, there are going to be one or two people who are into exactly what you’re into, but for the most part people won’t be. Just because you came up with a story won’t automatically make them want to read it.

Realising this is half the battle to avoiding it (although admittedly it is the easy half).

Read more »

Fiction Is About Facing Problems

One of the main tenets of writing story is to make the reader as the question: What happens next?

But this question shouldn’t be aimed at the writer, or even the story. The question should be aimed by readers at themselves.

And they shouldn’t be sure of the answer

Read more »