[Link] Character development: 9 tips for convincing arcs

by Now Novel

How characters grow and change, reach their goals or fail to, keeps us interested. In stories, character development is crucial:  If all your characters stay unchanged, even through extreme circumstances, your novel will feel two-dimensional. Developing your characters makes them ring true.

Here are 9 steps to creating satisfying character arcs:

1: Decide characters’ goals and motivations
2: Plan external obstacles your characters will face
3: Plan internal obstacles too
4: Give main characters foils
5: Include reversals that move character development
6: Develop characters using action and dialogue
7: Let your characters surprise you and your readers
8: Discover how your characters respond to challenges
9: Compensate for a flat character arc in others

Let’s explore each of these steps further...

Read the full article: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/character-development-tips/

[Link] 5 Types of Dialogue Your Novel Needs

by NowNovel

Dialogue is a key part of any character-driven novel. What characters say and how/why/when/where they say it is revealing. Read 5 types of dialogue your novel needs, and illustrative examples from books:

1: Dialogue introducing key characters
Dialogue is useful for introducing characters because:

• It allows subtlety. We can show crucial details of characters’ personalities without explicitly stating them in narration
• It moves quicker. Dialogue is nimbler than paragraphs of narration
• Characters’ voices gain immediacy. We meet characters through their own voices

Take this example from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The dystopian novel about a near-future world where women are enslaved for reproductive purposes is narrated by one such woman, Offred.

Here, we first meet Cora who works in the kitchen at Offred’s residence. Offred describes eavesdropping:

Sometimes I listen outside closed doors, a thing I never would have done in the time before […] Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn’t debase herself like that.
Nobody asking you, Cora said. Anyways, what could you do, supposing?
Go to the Colonies, Rita said. They have the choice.
With the Unwomen, and starve to death and Lord knows what all? said Cora. Catch You.

Cora’s voice is grimly practical. [Note: Atwood leaves out speech marks in her original text.] Cora is quick to shoot down Rita’s dream of greater freedom.

Read the full article: http://www.nownovel.com/blog/5-types-of-dialogue-novel-needs/

[Link] World building tips: Writing engaging settings

by NowNovel

World building tips often focus on fantastical genres such as fantasy and sci-fi because they entail creating worlds wholly other to our own. Yet it’s important to create an immersive, interesting and credible setting, whatever your genre. To create an entire fictional world, one to rival Westeros, Hogwarts (or Dickens’ London), read these world building tips and cautions:

1: Make a checklist of world-building details you want to include

We believe in our favourite authors’ invented worlds because there is enough detail and specificity to make them real. Legions of younger and older readers fell in love with Rowling’s Hogwarts, for example, because (in part) they could imagine her setting to its edges. Readers could picture the castle from the long tables and floating candles of its dining hall to its outer, more dangerous limits. The nearby ‘Forbidden Forest’, for example, or the menacing vegetation and grounds feature that is the unpredictable, thrashing ‘Whomping Willow’.

Great fictional worlds, like this one, have contrasts, details, atmospheres. The vaults of Rowling’s crypt-like bank, Gringotts, for example, have a different tone and mood to her student-filled castle.

Make a checklist of details you want to include in your novel’s world, whether you’re evoking a magical setting like Hogwarts or a real one like modern-day Paris.

Items you can include in your checklist...

Read the full article: http://www.nownovel.com/blog/world-building-tips-engaging-settings/

[Link] Famous characters teach us about characterization

From Anna Karenina to Jon Snow, Don Quixote to Harry Potter, famous characters from fiction worm their way under our skin. Here are lessons from several memorable characters in classic and modern novels:

1. Give characters internal and external conflicts

Most famous characters from books have this in common: They grapple with internal and external conflict.

Internal struggle might stem from difficult decisions or else the lingering psychological effects of past experiences. Characters also face external conflicts, from defeating villains to overcoming harsh, unforgiving environments.

Take, for example, the fictional character Jon Snow from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series (the source material for HBO’s A Game of Thrones).

Snow, the illegitimate son of Ned Stark, has limited prospects given the negative social status of being born out of wedlock. This is a typical issue for characters in fiction set in medieval and other earlier times involving nobility. (Illegitimacy is an important plot thread in Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example.)

Snow’s backstory shapes the character’s internal conflict. He is constantly reminded of his ‘illegitimate’ status, making him an outsider.

Besides the internal conflict this yields, it also launches external conflict. Jon’s father’s wife, Catelyn, for example, resents him because he is a living reminder of Ned’s infidelity. Together, internal and external conflict make Jon a sympathetic character, since he faces adversity through no fault of his own.

Internal and external conflicts advance plot. Jon joins the Night’s Watch that guards the borders to the north of Winterfell fortress. His decision is driven, in part, by the desire to escape the limitations imposed by his birth status. Jon Snow’s arc shows how internal and external conflict can shape a character’s psychology and choices.

Read the full article: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/famous-characters-teach-characterization/

[Link] Plot twist ideas: 7 examples and tips for twists

by Now Novel

A good plot twist adds intrigue, suspense or surprise to a novel. Plot twists are particularly popular in suspense-heavy novels such as murder mysteries, because they prolong suspense-creating questions about cause and identity. Read 7 examples of effective plot twists and what they teach us:

First, a brief plot twist definition

A plot twist is ‘an unexpected development in a book, film, television programme’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

Plot twists are particularly popular in short stories. In many stories they are the main event of the story arc. For example, in Roald Dahl’s classic short story ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, Mary Maloney kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb. The dark-humoured twist is that Mary serves detectives investigating her husband’s disappearance the evidence.

Authors like O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe perfected the art of the ‘twist-in-the-tale’ story. In these stories, the plot twist (like in Dahl’s story) is the climax. Yet plot twists are also popular in longer narratives.

Here are seven plot twist tips and ideas...

Read the full article: http://www.nownovel.com/blog/plot-twist-ideas-7-examples-tips/

[Link] Story plots: 7 tips to be more original

Clichéd story plots weaken an otherwise good story, a story where characters and settings are vivid. To tell a story that feels original and inventive, it’s key to learn plot clichés to avoid. Yet many original stories do use common tropes. The key is to make famous story types and scenarios your own:

1: Know common plot clichés within your genre

In story plots, clichés are frustrating because they’ve been hollowed out of their dramatic impact through overuse. Dragons that go on rampages overpopulate fantasy worlds. Women in distress who need men to save them overpopulate romance novels.

Here are a few more common plot clichés:

• The chosen one: A character has been selected for a task but there’s no backstory or explanation why only this person in particular is capable
• It was all a dream: Strange things happen but turn out to be dreams (often solving plot complications a little too conveniently for the author)
• Representative of another culture gives clueless protagonist profound wisdom: Another example of a common plot cliché, especially in books from earlier times that either romanticized indigenous people or portrayed them as savages (this example courtesy of Strange Horizons)
• In each of these examples, there is either a cop-out or an overused trope (a ‘trope’ is a literary device that occurs across multiple novels by various authors).

In the first example, there is nothing to explain what is so special about ‘the chosen one’. J.K. Rowling avoids the cliché of ‘the chosen one’ in Harry Potter by giving Harry a past link to the villain that explains exactly why it is he in particular who must fulfill the challenge.

In the ‘it was all a dream’ plot, there is always a risk of a cop-out. The revelation that characters have been dreaming can seem too trite or tidy an explanation for bizarre or puzzling events.

The third example is a plot point rather than an entire story idea. But it tells something valuable about being original: It’s better (for creative as well as political reasons) not to simply repeat received, dominant ideas. Stereotypes are the footmen of unoriginal stories and dangerous politics. The ‘exotic’ foreigner (or indigenous other) is likely to be just as full of flaws and folly as a protagonist.

Read the full article: http://www.nownovel.com/blog/story-plots-original-7-tips/

[Link] Writing crime fiction – 7 elements of gripping suspense

by Now Novel

Suspense is a critical aspect of writing crime fiction. All the elements outlined below can help to increase suspense over the course of your novel:

Conflict

Suspense arises from conflict. Before you can effectively create suspense throughout your crime novel, you need to have a handle on its central conflict. The main question of your novel might be answering who the murderer of a character was. You can use this question and the tension it creates as a starting point for building suspense.

Branching out from your major conflict, there may be smaller conflicts that also create tension. The investigator may interview two suspects, for example, who hate one another. Each might imply that the other may have been involved. Suspense may be built around efforts to cover up unsavoury facts about the deceased. Suspense may also be generated as the investigative protagonist gets closer to the answer since this places her life in danger.

Time

Unfolding your novel within a tight time frame is one of the best methods for building suspense. Whether your protagonist is in a 24-hour race against time like Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code or has all of 61 hours to save the day like Jack Reacher in the Lee Child novel 61 Hours, putting your protagonist on a ticking clock will likely make readers turn pages.

Read the full article: http://www.nownovel.com/blog/writing-crime-fiction/