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Creating Antagonists in Your Fiction

March 16, 2015March 16, 2015Uncategorized, Writing Tips

Guest Post by Jack Smith

Antagonists can be persons or larger forces—groups, institutions, the society as a whole, nature, or the cosmos. Plots dealing with larger forces tend to embody conflicts with individuals as representative of these larger forces. In conflicts with nature, individual antagonists can complicate these conflicts.

Let’s concentrate, then, on individuals…

Make sure your antagonist isn’t a one-dimensional or cardboard character, but is multi-dimensional—a worthy character to do battle with.

Avoid overshadowing your protagonist, but make your antagonist interesting enough to engage the reader; make him or her somewhat sympathetic, or at least empathetic, someone the reader can relate to. Namely:Continue reading

Use Attitude When Introducing Characters

March 2, 2015March 2, 2015Uncategorized, Writing Tips

by Jodie Renner, editor and author @JodieRennerEd

To celebrate the release of her third writing guide, Captivate Your Readers, Jodie has priced it at 99 cents for today only and will also be giving away 4 electronic copies – your choice of mobi (for Kindle), ePub (for other e-readers), or PDF – of this book, in exchange for an honest review by the end of March. Enter to win in the comments below.

A sure sign of a fiction writer who’s still learning his/her craft is when a character comes on the scene for the first time and the writer stops the story to describe the character from head to toe – height, build, hair color, eyes, other facial features, and all the details of their clothing, including colors, down to their shoes. Then the story picks up where it left off and carries on.

My latest writing guide, Captivate Your Readers, devotes four chapters to how to introduce and describe characters in a natural, intriguing way. The basic message is to stay in the protagonist’s viewpoint when introducing him, and describe other characters through the POV of the character observing them, not neutrally, as the author stepping in. Here, I’ll be discussing effective techniques for describing other characters through the observations and attitudes of the viewpoint character (most often the protagonist).Continue reading

Thoughts on Being a Hybrid Writer

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015Uncategorized

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

What’s it like being a hybrid writer (someone who both publishes traditionally and self-publishes)?

Today I’m at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group listing pros and cons of being a hybrid writer and tips for making it work. Hope you’ll pop over and join me.

Tax Time Revelations

February 13, 2015February 13, 2015Business of Writing, Publishing Changes, Uncategorized

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I had my tax appointment with my accountant on February 2^nd. This is really not “my thing,” but I feel a lot better now that I’ve got a CPA helping me. Although, as I walked into her office on the 2^nd, I said, “You know, taxes really make me anxious” and I promptly dropped all my receipts and papers on the floor. Apparently in an attempt to show, not tell.

But after all the trouble and the figure-finding and the paper shuffling, I found that I actually had some pretty interesting data. Here’s what I found out about tax year 2014:Continue reading

Yanking Readers Out of a Story

February 6, 2015February 5, 2015Uncategorized, Writing Tips

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I can be a pretty annoying person to watch television or movies with. Maybe most writers are. Plot holes and plot devices trip me up in bad stories and I’m too analytical of what works in good stories. This may be why I don’t get a lot of invitations to hang out and watch TV with members of my family.

Regardless of my general unpopularity as a movie-watching companion, my husband and I were watching the movie Lucy on Amazon Prime last weekend. It was, actually, a good film and one of the few genres that overlap enough so that my husband and I can both enjoy it. But there was one part (okay, probably three parts, actually. But I won’t give spoilers) where my husband said, “But why are they doing that? That wouldn’t happen—there would be cops all over the place.” And I said, maybe a bit impatiently, “Because it has to happen. For the story.” And I quickly explained why.

Once I pointed out the strings and the puppet master, we were both watching the movie from a different perspective.

It’s those types of moments when I’m reading a book or watching TV or movies that I try to avoid as a writer. Continue reading