by Stephanie Dethlefs | Apr 19, 2022 | Character Development, First Draft, Planning your book, Uncategorized
How do we create primary characters that are nuanced and complex without being stereotypical, flat, or strange caricatures of themselves? The key is to know them. Like, really know them. And it’s more than knowing things like their favorite sandwich or where they grew...
by Stephanie Dethlefs | Dec 14, 2021 | Character Development, First Draft, Planning your book, Revision, writing craft
Why do your protagonist and other characters make the decisions that they do in your story? How do you keep those decisions from running away with your plot? Whether we’re talking the big decisions, those actions that change the course of the story, and the...
by Stephanie Dethlefs | Oct 26, 2021 | First Draft, Revision, writing craft, writing life
Let’s talk about describing human characters well. That’s right, humans. Not fantastical flying creatures or beings from other worlds. Plain old, everyday humans. Which means that we don’t have the luxury of quite as much space on the page to describe them, or...
by Stephanie Dethlefs | Sep 7, 2021 | First Draft, Planning your book, Revision, writing craft
When I think of tension in a story, my first thought is of suspense. We are waiting for something to jump out of a dark corner or for the final confrontation between hero and villain. Our bodies are tense, preparing for what my 13-year-old son calls “the jump-scare.”...
by Stephanie Dethlefs | Aug 24, 2021 | Book Coaching, First Draft, Inner critic, Mindset, writing craft, writing life
I once heard the author Elizabeth Gilbert say, and I’m paraphrasing here, that a reader would likely find more of herself in her works of fiction than her works of memoir. The truth is that all writers bring themselves to their stories, no matter if the story is...
