Bring Your Characters to Life by Showing Their Reactions

by Jodie Renner, editor, author, speaker

I'm back at The Kill Zone blog again today, with concrete advice on bringing your characters and
story to life on the page by showing their perceptions, reactions and feelings.

Here's the beginning of the blog post, and a link to the rest of it:

A novel won’t draw me in unless I start caring about the protagonist and worrying about what’s going to happen to her – in other words, until I get emotionally engaged in the story. And it’s the same for most readers, I think. For me to warm up to the protagonist, he has to have some warmth and vulnerability and determination, some hopes and insecurities and fears.

As readers, to identify with and bond with the protagonist – and other characters – we need to see and feel their emotions and reactions to people and events around them. When the character feels and reacts, then they come alive for us and we get emotionally invested and start to worry about them and cheer for their small victories. Once you have your readers fretting about your hero and rooting for him, they’re hooked.

As the late, great Jack M. Bickham said, “Fiction characters who only think are dead. It is in their feelings that the readers will understand them, sympathize with them, and care about their plight.”

Show those feelings.

So bring your characters to life by showing their deepest fears, worries, frustrations, hopes and jubilations. If readers see your hero pumped, scared, angry, or worried, they’ll feel that way, too. And a reader who is feeling strong emotions is a reader who is turning the pages.

For more, including specific tips on achieving this, click HERE:

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor and the award-winning author of three writing guides in her series An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: FIRE UP YOUR FICTION, CAPTIVATE YOUR READERS, and WRITING A KILLER THRILLER, as well as two clickable time-saving e-resources, QUICK CLICKS: Spelling List and QUICK CLICKS: Word Usage. She has also organized and edited two anthologies. Website: https://www.jodierenner.com/, Facebook, Amazon Author Page.

Is Your Premise Believable and Logical?

Another great craft-of-writing article by James Scott Bell is up today over at The Kill Zone blog. This one will be incredibly useful to anyone crafting a mystery or thriller who wants to make sure everything it's based on is credible.

Here's the start and a link to the rest:

Don't Kill Your Thrills With Premise Implausibility

by James Scott Bell

@jamesscottbell

Last week I wrote about the most important rule for thriller writers to follow, namely:
 

Never allow any of your main characters to act like idiots in order to move or wrap up your plot!
 

I think I spoke to soon. There is a second rule that is of equal import: the overall premise of the thriller must be justified in a way that is a) surprising, and yet b) makes perfect sense.
 

This is not easy. Otherwise, everybody would be writing The Sixth Sense every time out. Not even M. Night Shyamalan is writing The Sixth Sense every time out! 
 

So what can we do to up our chances of getting our thriller ending right?

1. Think About Your Contractual Obligation

... 

For the rest of this excellent article, with a very useful list, click here:

http://killzoneauthors.blogspot.ca/2013/09/dont-kill-your-thrills-with-premise.html#.UizYQiJza70

Info with Attitude

Info with Attitude - The Kill Zone

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

 

Here's an excerpt from an article of mine that appeared recently on the excellent blog, The Kill Zone. For the rest of the article, click on the link at the end.

As a freelance fiction editor, I find that military personnel, professionals, academics, police officers, and others who are used to imparting factual information in objective, detached, bias-free ways often need a lot of coaching in loosening up their language and adding attitude and emotions to create a captivating story world.

Today I welcome back to TKZ my friend and editor, Jodie Renner, to share tips on imparting factual information without it coming off like the dreaded “info dump”. Her craft-of-writing book, Style That Sizzles & Pacing for Power, recently came out in paperback. Enjoy!
-------------------
by Jodie Renner, editor and craft writer

Strategies for Turning Impersonal Info Dumps into Compelling Copy


Really need those facts in there? Rewrite with attitude!

Say you want to write a fast-paced novel and your background is in a specialized field, so you decide to set your story in that milieu you know so well. Maybe you want to write a legal thriller or a medical suspense, or a mystery involving scientific research or stolen artifacts. Or maybe you’d like to use your military, police, or forensics experience, but your writing experience to date has mainly been confined to producing terse, objective, factual reports.

As you’re writing your story, you decide at various points that you need to interrupt the story to explain something the readers may not understand. And you want to get it right, both to lend credibility to your story and because you’re concerned about criticism from other professionals in your field. Your first impulse might be to copy and paste sections on that topic from a journal or online search, then tweak them a bit. Or just stop to explain the technical points in your own words, factually, as you would in a report or research paper, then go back to your storyline. Big mistake. You’ve just interrupted an exciting (we hope!) story to give a mini-lecture. Remember that the main purpose of fiction is to entertain your readers with an engaging tale. To do that, it’s critical to stay in the story and in the viewpoint and voice of your compelling, charismatic (we hope!) characters.

How to keep your credibility but write with passion and tension

Want to keep your readers turning the pages? ...

For the rest of this article, click HERE.

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor who specializes in thrillers, mysteries, and other fast-paced fiction. For more info on Jodie’s editing services and her books, please visit her website. Jodie has published two books to date in her series, An Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: Writing and Killer Thriller, a short e-book, and Style That Sizzles & Pacing for Power, which is available in paperback, as an e-book on Kindle, and in other e-book formats. And you don’t need to own an e-reader to purchase and enjoy e-books. You can download them to your computer, tablet, or smartphone.