Writers Helping Writers^®

Fear

How to Uncover Your Character’s Inner Conflict

November 10, 2022

How to Uncover Your Character’s Inner Conflict

November 10, 2022

Conflict is a powerful element within the story and can be loosely categorized as either Outer (external) Conflict or Inner (internal) Conflict. The difference is that outer conflict is something…

Use Conflict to Target a Character’s Soft Spots

August 25, 2022

Use Conflict to Target a Character’s Soft Spots

August 25, 2022

Conflict is a key story ingredient, one we need a lot of, but this doesn’t mean quantity is better than quality. Fiction isn’t a video game; waves of bad guys…

When to Kill a Character

February 22, 2022

Well, Valentine’s Day is in the rearview, so it’s time to move on to a less lovey-dovey topic: killing people. Fictional people, of course! Let’s face it, some of our…

Fear Thesaurus: Failure

February 19, 2022

Debilitating fears are a problem for everyone, an unfortunate part of the human experience. Whether they’re a result of learned behavior as a child, are related to a mental illness,…

Introducing…The Fear Thesaurus!

February 12, 2022

Introducing…The Fear Thesaurus!

February 12, 2022

Fear is an undeniable part of the human experience, for both real and fictional people. At its most basic, it warns our characters of potential danger and encourages them to…

5 Ways Trauma Makes Your Character an Unreliable Narrator

October 30, 2021

5 Ways Trauma Makes Your Character an Unreliable Narrator

October 30, 2021

Trauma is defined as anything that’s overwhelming or unpleasant that causes long-term mental or emotional problems. It rewires the brain and causes disordered thinking. So, if you’re looking for a…

Describing a Character’s Emotions: Problems and Solutions

August 14, 2021

Describing a Character’s Emotions: Problems and Solutions

August 14, 2021

Characters are the heart of a story, but what really draws readers in is their emotions. Only…showing them isn’t always easy, is it? Like us in the real world, characters…

How to Write Emotion Well: Know Your Character

April 29, 2021

How to Write Emotion Well: Know Your Character

April 29, 2021

We’ve all read stories where our breath slows, the world falls away, and the page disappears. We’re somewhere else, a place that isn’t real, yet is. We’re with people who…

Dropping Breadcrumbs: How to Show a Character’s Emotional Wound Through Behavior

November 5, 2020

Dropping Breadcrumbs: How to Show a Character’s Emotional Wound Through Behavior

November 5, 2020

Emotional wounds are transformative and have the power to re-shape a character in many negative ways, impacting their happiness, their self-worth, and causing mistrust and disillusionment to skew their worldview.…

6 Tricks to Layer on Stakes

August 11, 2020

6 Tricks to Layer on Stakes

August 11, 2020

Stakes are what are at risk in a story. It might be that the protagonist’s life is at risk, or perhaps a romantic relationship, or maybe the opportunity to go…