character

Two arms stretching across with fingers barely touching

Empathy & Character

by

Empathy is not agreement. Empathy is “get”-ment. Empathy is a deep understanding of another person’s perspective and/or experience. But empathy does not start with understanding, it starts with a guess. Here, we’re gonna get into how to apply empathy to a character. On Empathy The essential question of empathy is: …

Woman with face in hands seen on a subway car

Add Emotion to Fictional Characters

by

Expression of emotions in speculative fiction writing is crucial to engage readers and create a vivid, immersive experience. As a novel writer who struggles with adding emotion to my characters, I did Internet searches on the topic to help me. Lots of writers and educators have suggestions. I asked chatGPT …

Add Emotional Depth to Characters

by

Character Symptoms: emotionless, bland, and uninteresting Imagine a critique partner reads your first chapter and says: DIAGNOSIS: Your character is not relatable It’s time for a transplant of personality, humanity, emotion, and agency. Character’s Emotional Reaction to the Plot Characters should show emotion in how they react to situations confronting …

Your Character’s Thoughts

by

At a glance, it used to be easy to identify what a character was thinking, hearing, seeing, or saying BECAUSE the author would write: he thought, she heard, he saw or she said… The current trend is to remove such markers or filters to reduce the “narrative distance” between the …

Short Story Elements

by

Short stories are fun to read because they pack an unexpected emotional punch. However, “short” does not mean easy to write, or a formless type of expression. Quite the contrary, they are written and rewritten numerous times with herculean effort to be efficient, banish loose ends, conclude with a plot …