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Why Realistic Motives Alone Don’t Create Believable Villains
As long as a villain has a reason for his wicked behavior, he’ll seem real. Right? Or will he? Shoppers grow hungry but don’t steal. Bank tellers get angry but don’t beat up customers. Hardships tempt people to commit crimes daily, but they control themselves.
Give Readers What They Need, Not Just What They Want
Though stories are imaginary, they have an incredible ability to encourage readers to either engage deeply with the real world, or search for an escape. As writers, our responsibility is to be intentional about the reactions we provoke and instead fill readers up. Only when they’re overflowing with hope can they pour themselves into others. To leave them in a better state than you found them, you need to stir up a special sort of longing.
How to Write Characters Who Struggle with Anxiety
Anxiety has become increasingly common with all of the turmoil in the world today, affecting a wide variety of people regardless of age, gender, or lifestyle. Since identifying the problems readers are facing is essential to creating relatable characters, anxiety needs to be represented in fiction—and Christian authors have a unique ability to provide comfort.
How Parents Can Build Sustainable Writing Habits
Writing at any stage of life can be difficult. Some stages present especially complex challenges, like raising children. Your time, resources, and even your body (if you’re nurturing an infant) are no longer your own. How do you craft characters and plots when you’re stepping on Duplos while cooking dinner and your toddler asks so many ponderous questions that you can’t concentrate? To all the parents whose coffee has gone cold, you’re not alone.
How to Write Emotionally Powerful Physical Pain without Coming Across as a Sadist
Writers are a brutal sect. We spend our free time inventing new methods of torturing characters, all while cackling like gremlins over the tears of heartbroken readers. “I’m off to kill someone” is a phrase tossed around like a tennis ball in writing communities. To the outside observer, our dark humor may seem psychotic. What normal person beats their brainchildren into a pulp only to quip about it later? Although the jokes are often in poor taste, suffering draws in writers, and readers, for better reasons than mental instability.
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