Often referred to as “the dark night of the soul” in writing circles, lament often leads our characters to a moment of clarity about how the choices they’ve made and the experiences they’ve lived through have brought them to this specific moment in time. This key scene is crucial for the character’s transformation and ultimate victory. Read on to learn more about what lament is and the role it plays in the lives of our characters—and in our lives as well!
Category: Creativity
While it’s true that our characters will not always be a good match for every reader who picks up our books, as writers, we do have the opportunity to give our characters their best chance by introducing a reason for them having those unlikeable traits from the beginning of the story.
Your time is precious. And what you choose to invest it in now will impact what it yields to you later. If you’re waking up on Mondays, dreading the week ahead, perhaps it’s time to take a good look at what exactly it is about the week that’s making you feel this way.
When it comes to our five senses, smell is kind of like the baby toe. We don’t realize how much we rely on it until we can’t use it—either temporarily or long-term—during an illness or because we’ve suffered an injury to our nose. In our writing, scents can serve as a strong anchor for a scene.
You’ve heard it said, “Sometimes less is more.”
That’s especially true in writing. Gone are the days when authors needed to spend paragraphs and pages telling the reader exactly what each character and piece of furniture in a room looked like. It kills the pacing of the story, and today’s readers have no patience for it.
However, there is a fine line between giving readers enough information for their own imaginations to populate and decorate the story…and not giving them enough detail to work with at all.
As writers, we take time to get to know what kind of “hero” the protagonist of our story is. We get to know their wants, their needs, their hopes, their fears, and how they’ll respond to certain situations. We look at the world they live in, the people they’re surrounded by. We identify their allies…
While working on multiple different projects can help us discover what type of writing we enjoy most and can help us start adding publishing credits to our name, it can also leave us feeling a bit like we’re “butter that’s been spread over too much bread.” Before too long, we can find ourselves looking back and wondering where we are and how we got here.
The road to get from writing the first words of a story to its official last sentence may take a little longer than you’d like, but I can say with confidence as one who is still on her own journey, it’s worth the extra time.
Merriam-Webster defines the word “encourage” as “to inspire with courage, spirit, or hope. To hearten.” It also defines it as “to attempt to persuade: to urge”; “to spur on: to stimulate”; and “to give help or patronage to: to foster.”
MW defines influence as “the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways. To sway.” It also defines the word as “the act or power of producing an effect with apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command.”