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Posts by Angela Ackerman

How to Show Your Character’s Repressed Emotions

September 11, 2025

How to Show Your Character’s Repressed Emotions

September 11, 2025

Crafting characters that readers will connect to is every writer’s goal and dozens (hundreds?) of methods exist to achieve it: deep backstory planning, character profile sheets, questionnaires, etc. Regardless of…

Show, Don’t Tell: Write Authentic Character Reactions with The Emotion Thesaurus

September 7, 2025

Show, Don’t Tell: Write Authentic Character Reactions with The Emotion Thesaurus

September 7, 2025

Showing authentic character emotion isn’t easy, which is why so many writers turn to The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression. It covers 130 emotions, providing lists of…

How to Use the Four Levels of Conflict to Strengthen Your Story

August 14, 2025

How to Use the Four Levels of Conflict to Strengthen Your Story

August 14, 2025

A cardinal sin of storytelling is to skimp on conflict, and no wonder. Those problems, challenges, obstacles, and inner struggles help keep readers engaged, casting doubt on the character’s ability…

How to Show Your Character Is Healing from an Emotional Wound

August 7, 2025

How to Show Your Character Is Healing from an Emotional Wound

August 7, 2025

When it comes to writing a story where a character is going to work through a difficult past wound, there are two behavioral states to convey: one showing their brokenness…

How to Amp up Your Story Setting

July 31, 2025

How to Amp up Your Story Setting

July 31, 2025

Taking the time to choose the right setting for each scene is one of the best ways to ensure our writing has impact. Why? Because the setting touches everything. It…

Tap into Your Character’s Unmet Need to Strengthen Your Story

July 24, 2025

Tap into Your Character’s Unmet Need to Strengthen Your Story

July 24, 2025

Life can be painful, especially for our characters. In fact, the fallout of an emotionally wounding event such as a car accident, failing to save someone’s life, infertility, or being…

How to Use Hidden Experiences to Pull Readers In

July 22, 2025

How to Use Hidden Experiences to Pull Readers In

July 22, 2025

No matter who your protagonist is—a formidable galactic emperor, a morally complex teenager, or the retiree down the street with too many cats—readers must find something fundamentally relatable about them,…

New Writing Resource: A Character Type & Trope Thesaurus + Save 25%

May 17, 2025

New Writing Resource: A Character Type & Trope Thesaurus + Save 25%

May 17, 2025

In 2024, Becca and I began exploring character tropes and archetypes with one goal in mind: to create a resource that helps writers better use tropes by providing each one’s…

Workshop: How to Write Compelling Inner Conflict with Angela Ackerman

May 9, 2025

Workshop: How to Write Compelling Inner Conflict with Angela Ackerman

May 9, 2025

Ready to dive into your character’s internal struggle and put all that incredible gut-twisting conflict on the page? If so, don’t miss this upcoming Zoom workshop on Saturday, May 24th,…

Using a Character’s Personality Traits to Generate Conflict

April 10, 2025

Using a Character’s Personality Traits to Generate Conflict

April 10, 2025

When it comes to generating conflict, your character’s personality can help ensure that sparks fly, especially when their traits clash with someone else’s. When people grate on one another their…