Characters lacking in agency often don’t have many motivating factors to help them think, speak, or act. Instead, they passively accept the things happening around them.
This can make it difficult for the reader to empathize with your characters, often because it seems the characters are doing nothing to help themselves. As a result, you may risk losing your reader’s interest in your novel.
Read MoreRemember Goldilocks and the Three Bears? We don’t want too much or too little background on a character in a manuscript. We want it to be just right.
Read MoreIf you’ve taken a creative writing workshop or even a high school composition course, you’ve likely heard the advice: “Show, don’t tell.”
When we’re writing fiction or creative non-fiction, we want to show instead of tell, which translates to telling our story through a series of interconnected scenes, instead of summarizing the events that happened.
If a character needs a raise to pay the rent, the writer shouldn’t explicitly state, “Bob needed a raise to pay his rent,” at least not without also providing supporting details. Instead, she may place an important conversation between Bob and his work best friend in a coffee shop, where Bob explains that he’s having his second triple latte of the day at 10:00 a.m. after pulling an all-nighter with the quarterly earnings report.
So, yes, “Show, don’t tell.” You know that intuitively. But I’m here to explain part of the “why” behind this age-old adage.
Read MoreHint: This is a trick question.
Read MoreArtificial Intelligence is doing some pretty impressive things right now, but there are very few programs that currently meet the expectations we have for a human editor.
Though many writers have sophisticated word processors, they may still make egregious spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, while overseen by the software. Moreover, these programs can’t yet catch continuity or fact-check errors on their own.
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