Category Archives: Emotion
Three Ways Writers Tell, Not Show (And How You Can Fix Them)
One of my favorite writing coaches is here with us to dish some helpful advice on Show and Tell. Please welcome Janice Hardy and read on… Show, don’t tell, is drilled into every writer’s head, and most of us have … Continue reading
New Release: The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression (2nd Edition)!
Today’s the day: The Emotion Thesaurus (Second Edition) enters the world! Over the years, many of you have written to us about the impact our book has had on your writing. Whenever we hear that your editor is commenting on … Continue reading
Introducing One Stop for Writers’ Character Builder
Life is crazy sometimes. Here it is, less than a week away from us launching a book people are very, very excited about, and we’re about to share something else that is, in our humble opinion, even bigger and better: … Continue reading
The Key Components of a Compelling Character (According to Psychology)
We’re fascinated by our fellow humans. In fact, we have a profound desire to try and understand the thoughts and feelings bouncing around other people, the characters on TV…the hero introduced on your first page. From an evolutionary perspective, this … Continue reading
How to Get Emotion Onto the Page
It is a truth universally acknowledged: you have to hook the reader right out of the starting gate. From the very first sentence your story must incite that delicious sense of urgency that makes readers have to know what happens next. But … Continue reading
The Powerball of First Page Resources
As many of you know, I run a monthly critique contest here at the blog, where I offer to read first pages and share my feedback. People are so grateful to win, but I have to ask: who’s the real … Continue reading
Capturing Complex Emotion: A Writer’s Superpower
Our brain is driven by emotion. We may like to think we’re rational beings, applying the rules of logic calmly and sensibly to those little and not-so-little decisions, but our every thought, our whole perspective is colored by emotion. What … Continue reading
And…Action! Applying TV Lessons to Chapter Hooks
We’ve probably all heard the advice to end our scenes and chapters on a hook. At the end of every scene or chapter, readers might put down our book and decide against picking it up again, so it’s important to … Continue reading
Powerful Scenes: Using One Stop for Writers’ Informal Scene Map
A while back I profiled some of the custom brainstorming tools at our sister-site, One Stop for Writers, which help take the mystery (and misery) out of story structure. One that I left off that post was our Informal Scene … Continue reading
Crafting a “Body Language Voice”
You’ve probably heard about “voice”–that elusive quality that so many editors, agents, and readers are drawn to. Years ago, I did a couple of posts about character voice, arguing that it’s made up of what the character says and how … Continue reading