What are the advantages and pitfalls of using real places and names in your writing? What should you fictionalize, and what can you leave the same? It all comes down to genre expectations, how close to reality you want to be, and not pulling your readers out of your story!
If your story doesn’t have a bad guy, what do you have? How can you use stories about nature or society to craft a non-personified antagonist? Do you have to have characters involved? And are these external, or internal forces? What effect does this have on your story? And how can you keep a reader interested?
What are stakes? And how does your characters agency interact with them? How do you make your stakes personal and individual for your character? And how can you use your stakes to evaluate your plot structure? How should the stakes change through the story? And how do the stakes affect your characters actions? Remember, your characters agency must be the thing that drives your story forward!
What is pacing? How do you decide the best pace for your story? And how do you achieve that pace? What kind of effect can pacing have for your readers? And why is pacing so different between books and movies? Check out the things we’ve mentioned section to check out those books we talked about – those we loved and even those we didn’t.
How should you use layers of emotion? And at what point in the writing process should you focus on getting them on the page? How should your character express their emotions and when can you tell if you are throttling them? Remember that not everything has to be big to be powerful and that each emotional moment for your character will have an emotional tail.
I'm Alida
I help people express their gifts to the world.
I do not believe in formulas. I believe that the stories we are compelled to tell the world make demands on us, and it is our privilege to meet those demands in order to reach the most people in the most authentic and compelling way possible.
