One thing I’ve always liked about writers is that most of us tend to see other authors as our comrades, rather than our competition. We like to share ideas and lessons we’ve learned along our journeys through the literary landscape. Instead of putting others down, writers lift each other up. We’re a community.
That’s what Writers in the Storm Blog and other resources like it are all about. They’re about writers helping other writers to elevate their skills and achieve their goals. But what’s in it for us? How does helping others help us reach our own goals?
Let’s look at some of the benefits we reap by helping others.
How We Can Help Each Other
Read and Review
One of the best ways to help writers, especially independent authors, is to read their books and then take the time to post an honest review. The more reviews a book gets, the more likely it is they will be pushed and promoted by the algorithms.
Identify yourself as a fellow writer in the review. Give the author some encouragement and then give some real feedback. Be honest but tactful. Most writers would rather have honest reviews than a bunch of empty ratings, even if they are five stars.
The benefit to you comes in a couple of ways. A well written review will often catch the eye of the author and in some cases they will feel compelled to reciprocate. They may even reach out to you and ask for permission to use your words in their promotions. This can lead to wider exposure for you.
Readers also look at reviews when deciding whether to buy a book or not. A well written review may lead them to put your name in a search engine and check your offerings out as well.
Beta Reading
Beta reading for other authors is a great way to help take them to the next level. We all get blind to our own mistakes over time, so other eyes are essential to producing a quality manuscript. Offer to be those eyes. Even when a story is not in our chosen genre, we can still recognize plot holes and speed bumps that need to be delt with, so don’t limit yourself too much.
The main benefit of beta reading for others is building relationships. When you help them out, they’re more likely to help you in the future. When your next manuscript is ready for other eyes ask for them to return the favor.
Beta reading will also benefit your writing. Reading examples of different voices, genres, and descriptive language will help to expand the tools you have at your disposal when you sit down to the keyboard.
Critique Groups
Joining a critique group is a great way to help other writers. A well-run group offers the opportunity for both new and experienced writers to come together and share what they’ve learned. Unlike beta reading, the feedback is face to face (be it virtual or in-person). This allows for a back-and-forth conversation, sparking discussion and clearing up feedback that might otherwise be misunderstood.
If you are a new writer, the benefit to you is obvious—you get to pick the brains of more experienced writers. If you are a veteran writer, critique groups can expose you to new ideas and genres you don’t normally read, thus broadening your horizons. It also helps you mentally to be around others who understand your struggle the way non-writers can’t.
Blogging
Some authors choose to share their knowledge through blogs like this one. It’s an effective way to help lots of writers all at once. Blogging gives you the chance to present the lessons you’ve learned in a way that reaches a broader audience and creates an archive that can be accessed whenever needed.
Blogging helps you by extending your reach as a writer. Getting your name out there attached to helpful writing related information can push you higher in the search engines and add to your credibility. It helps you spread your brand, which in turn can lead to better sales numbers.
The research required to write a blog also helps to build your own knowledge and skill as a writer. I can’t begin to tell you the things I’ve learned researching materials for a blog. Well, actually I can. That’s what I do every time I write one! When I’m preparing a blog post I do the research, learn new things, and then share the results with all of you.
Social Media
Social media has become a big part of succeeding as an author. While it can be both a blessing and a curse, it’s something we all must deal with. Taking the time to share and interact are key to building an online presence to bolster your brand.
We can help other writers build their presence by liking, sharing, and commenting on their posts. Tagging them and adding links to their books and websites helps get the word out when they have new releases or events to promote.
What do we get out of this? Not only do our followers see the posts, but their followers as well, which increases our reach beyond our own borders. If their followers comment on our interactions, then the exposure extends even further. It doesn’t take long for a well worded post or reply to grow legs.
One word of caution—be careful when using social media to grow your audience. Make sure your interactions, as well as the people you interact with, fit your brand. It’s easy to get pulled into exchanges that hurt your reputation, so be mindful and think before you hit the ‘send’ button.
Final Thoughts
Writers really are a community. We should all do whatever we can to help each other succeed. Reach down and lend a hand whenever possible. You never know when you might be the one needing a hand up.
How do you help your writing community? How has it benefitted you? Let us know in the comments!
About Bob
Eldred Bird writes contemporary fiction, short stories, and personal essays. He has spent a great deal of time exploring the deserts, forests, and deep canyons inside his home state of Arizona. His James McCarthy adventures, Killing Karma, Catching Karma, and Cold Karma, reflect this love of the Grand Canyon State even as his character solves mysteries amidst danger. Eldred explores the boundaries of short fiction in his stories, The Waking Room, Treble in Paradise: A Tale of Sax and Violins, and The Smell of Fear.
When he’s not writing, Eldred spends time cycling, hiking, and juggling (yes, juggling…bowling balls and 21-inch knives).
His passion for photography allows him to record his travels. He can be found on Twitter or Facebook, or at his website.
You can create charming good guys and vicious villains, the hookiest of hooks, brilliant worlds, and twisty plots with the most intense cliffhangers, but if readers don’t care about your characters, they won’t recommend your book to their friends. Or worse, they’ll put the book down and never buy your books ever again. Why would they do that? Because they didn’t connect with your protagonist, antagonist, or viewpoint characters. Your reader wants to connect with at least one of those characters. They open the book wanting to love or hate your characters. But creating characters your readers connect with takes work. What makes readers not care? It could be one of several problems.
Why Readers Put Down Your Books
You’ve put a lot of work into writing your book. You love your characters and your story but your readers, be they critique partners, alpha or beta readers, or your book reviews, tell you your book was boring, or they couldn’t finish your book and put down your book, or they didn’t like it at all. It hurts. A lot. But it’s time to put aside your emotions and examine your reader and your story.
If one reader has issues, the reader is probably not your target audience. If more than one reader makes similar complaints, it’s probably something your book does or doesn’t do. Evaluate it as objectively as you can. (Ask for help if you can’t.) Does it suffer from one of these common issues?
There is no problem that matters.
The conflict happens off stage.
Unrelated cause and effect.
Your character is a stereotype or trope.
You aren’t putting your reader in your character’s shoes.
Your character didn’t earn the ending.
No worries. All authors experience at least one manuscript with faults that stop the reader. Take heart. There are ways to fix these problems in your writing. You can learn to create characters your readers will love or hate and will pay to read more of their stories.
The Problem Doesn’t Matter
If your character is happy and content, why should the reader care? Even if the story problem is a big bad guy or a world-ending catastrophe, if your character doesn’t care deeply and personally, neither will your reader. Being an altruistic superhero isn’t enough. The problem must matter to the protagonist or it won’t matter to the reader.
Remember the 2008 movie, The Incredible Hulk? Not a blockbuster. People didn’t connect with the film or the character because Banner’s needs and problems were largely unconnected to Hulk. In fact, he wanted to control Hulk. And Hulk’s limited reactions were usually “Hulk angry” or “SMASH!”
Compare that movie to the deep characterization of the 2018 movie, Black Panther. We see T’Challa as a child yearning for a place he’s never seen. We feel the trauma of his father’s murder and we know his need to find his place, his destiny, to be the man his father wanted him to be. Most people can relate to that. Watching him struggle and fail and struggle again against a foe and against himself, we grow to care about him and his challenges. The problems T’Challa faced mattered both personally and in his larger world. His personal connection to the problem became the viewers’ connection.
We human beings gravitate toward the personal.
The challenges we choose or we make for ourselves may have some level of altruism, but deep down, it is something specific and personal. Look for a personal connection your protagonist has with the problem in your story. Ask yourself:
Is this problem one that he could solve easily by doing one thing?
Does the problem challenge his beliefs, his morals, his sense of duty, or his worldview?
Does the problem test his resolve to reach a solution?
If he does not face this challenge, will it change his sense of success or worthiness?
What does he fear will be the catastrophe if he doesn’t act?
The Conflict Occurs Off-Stage
In fiction, conflict exists when some person, place or thing keeps your character from what he wants. It’s what forces your character to re-assess what he wants or how he’s going to get it.
The reader is interested in how your character struggles to get what he wants. Describing action which takes place off-stage is a variation of telling and not showing. It distances the reader from your characters and from your story.
Guess what? If you avoid conflict in real life like many introverts do, there’s a good chance you’ll avoid it in your story. When the confrontation with that obstacle isn’t on the page, you must tell us what happened. So no matter how difficult or heroic that fight may have been, we hear it from the protagonist, which makes any actions he took less immediate and less important. A conversation or flashback can’t make him or the reader feel the immediacy of an on-stage conflict. And it can make him sound conceited.
Keep the story problem center stage.
Let your reader see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and viscerally feel his emotional responses to the obstacle. The reader can connect with those. Make those responses strong enough and it hooks the reader. Make them personal enough and the reader will not want to stop reading.
Sometimes things need to happen off-stage. Make certain what happens off-stage is not a pivotal point for the story. Backstory is an off-stage thing—usually. The character tells us about backstory; we don’t experience it with the character. Some backstory may be necessary to include in your book, but break it up into tiny slivers of information that you tell the reader over many pages. Let your reader walk in your characters’ shoes.
Scenes that lack conflict or tension.
A common scene that lacks conflict is a travel scene. A detailed description of a character traveling from point A to point B is a usually a bore even if fantasy plants and creatures fill the forest. Should your character need to travel, don’t drag us along on the journey unless something important challenges him or changes his course or you’re writing a travelogue. Instead of a travelogue, give the reader a summary statement or a jump-cut.
To keep the main story conflict center stage, ask yourself:
How does this scene involve part of the story problem?
How does this (scene or action) make your protagonist (or antagonist) closer to or farther from his goal?
Unrelated (or poorly related) Cause and Effect
If your protagonist acts in ways that are unrelated to the main story problem or unrelated to previous actions by your antagonist, you have created a haphazard appearing plot. There’s no relationship the reader can discern between the cause of one action and the effect. Note, we are not talking about subplot cause and effect. Your main story problem must remain both center stage and be a progression of challenges of increasing difficulty.
How do you make certain you’ve got cause and effect?
For each scene in your book, ask yourself:
Do the actions of your protagonist challenge and confound your antagonist, and vice versa?
Do your protagonist’s and antagonist’s reactions show how this action intensified their emotions and or needs?
Is the character’s problem more challenging in this scene than in the previous scene?
Does the action or reaction of your character lead him to try a different, more challenging action?
Your Character is a Stereotype or Trope
A man rides an arrow to jump over the word Stereotype to illustrate the power of justice and fairness in overcoming stereotyping, discrimination and racism
Stereotypes and trope-based characters are one-dimensional characters that go through the motions to fulfill the plot. The dialogue is task oriented and the characters only care about getting this plot thing done.
There are some genres where character doesn’t matter as much as plot or location. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that character doesn’t matter at all. Your readers will respond better to your story if you give those stereotypes or tropes a little twist. Often in these types of stories, honor or duty can drive your characters’ actions. Give him a background need that motivates him. Maybe he needs to prove himself to his father. He could have done something dishonorable in the past for which he must make amends. You don’t have to, and probably shouldn’t, go deep into the emotions or needs, but sprinkle tiny doses throughout this type of story and your plot-loving and trope-loving readers will eat it up.
If you aren’t writing one of those genres, take a hard look at your characters. One or two one dimensional characters can glide through certain stories. Your protagonist and antagonist need to be more.
To make certain your characters aren’t stereotypes or trope-based characters readers don’t care about...
Ask yourself:
What about this character is like similar types in books or movies?
What about this character is different?
How does this difference change the way he acts and reacts (from the other stereotypes)?
Put Your Reader in Your Character’s Shoes
Maybe you have a meaningful theme, a thrilling struggle, and intensely personal character problems, but your readers still don’t care. That often happens when you are telling instead of showing what your character feels or why he does what he does.
To put your reader in your character’s shoes, she needs to do more than see what’s happening. She needs to feel your protagonist’s doubt, his hope, his fear. She wants to hear what he hears, smell what he smells, taste what he tastes, feel what he touches and how his body responds to the situation.
Don’t know how to do that? Learn how a human body reacts to these intense feelings. Study why people similar to your characters think and act as they do.
Do you need a degree in anatomy and physiology and one in psychology to put readers in your character’s shoes? Not unless you want to.
Be an observer.
Start with yourself. Record what you feel in which body parts and what you sense (sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing) when you experience intense emotions. Journal interactions between people you watch at the mall, the restaurant, or the public park. Save snippets of other authors’ writings you felt viscerally when you read it. Practice writing variations of those feelings. It will get easier and more intuitive as you practice.
You don’t have to create a good or likeable character. Even if your WIP is an anti-hero story or a horror story, your reader needs to connect to your protagonist or viewpoint character. Look for successful examples in fiction or (cautiously in film and television) Examples like: Sauron, Professor Moriarty, Hannibal Lector, or Shere Khan.
Read each page of your WIP and ask yourself:
Does the character use as many of his five senses as possible on each page? (Hint: five on a page are the ideal.)
What physical feelings are on this page?
What internal reaction is on this page? Or, What emotions are on this page?
Am I using the same senses, physical feelings, or internal reactions over and over, or are they varied and different in intensity?
Your Character Didn’t Earn the Ending.
When you create situations and conflicts that your protagonist does not or cannot solve, the reader will feel your character didn’t earn the victory or the tragedy at the end of the story. Even in a story with an ensemble cast, there has to be at least one member of that team with whom the reader connects on an emotional level.
I get it. You love your characters so much you don’t want to hurt them that badly. That is what Janice Hardy calls “the Nice Writer Syndrome.” That can be deadly to your readers’ interest.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
HELEN KELLER
Throughout your book, your protagonist must make tough choices and do things that he doesn’t want to but feels he must or the antagonist forces him to do. Embarrass him. Set him up to make bold choices that frighten him. Make him fail even when he tries his best. Make him try harder. Create a situation where your protagonist must do something awful, so bad he can’t see a way to redeem himself. Make your character give in to temptation, then make him pay the consequences for his actions. Prey on his weaknesses. Break him. Make him claw back toward redemption. Make him avoid learning or improving until he can’t help but learn. Hint: the lesson learned is the theme of your story.
For most stories, the character’s pain and the way he deals with it are the emotional frame of your story. Your reader recognizes it and relates to it even when your protagonist is a superhero or alien.
One way to increase your character’s pain is to brainstorm different outcomes for each scene.
Ask yourself:
What would he believe is the best possible outcome?
How could that hurt him?
What makes him change his mind?
What challenges the way he thinks right now?
Is what comes next the worst thing he ever imagined could happen?
What would break him?
Do You Need to Hurt Your Protagonist That Much?
Yes. You need to bring your protagonist to the edge of destruction. Bring him to a disaster that has the real potential of breaking him beyond repair. While some genres demand the disaster be a world-ending trauma or event, it doesn’t have to be. But your protagonist needs to think and feel the wrong outcome will destroy his world.
Making a horrible thing happen to your character isn’t enough. Why? Because horrible things happen every day. Horrible things happen to many of us. But none of us are who you’re writing about. You’re writing about someone specific. If the disaster you have planned is equally horrible for any of your characters, you haven’t found the right horrible thing yet. Why does it matter to this character? Root the disaster in your character’s greatest fear, his misbelief. For example, one of T’Challa’s misbeliefs was that his father never failed him. Yet his father killed his brother and orphaned his own nephew, who became “a monster of our own making.”
Every decision your protagonist has made during the story has led him to this moment, to his dilemma. Meaning it’s all his own fault! Without that disaster, without his self-indictment, the reader doesn’t cheer for the character when he finally overcomes the disaster.
Learn to hurt your protagonist in the feels. No, not necessarily a bodily injury or even death. Start with something small but vitally important to him. Dangle it in front of him, then snatch it away. Pretend you’re just teasing until you can take writerly pleasure in torturing your characters.
Having trouble getting to that point?
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
What choice would make your character find it nearly impossible to make?
What forces your character to feel powerless, hopeless, unredeemable, alone?
How does this disaster make the character blame himself for the disaster?
How does it make him face his fear and misbelief?
Parting Thoughts
We humans suffer various degrees of challenges every day. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” We can say the same of reading fiction. Our readers read to see how story characters react to suffering and what meaning those characters find in their suffering to escape or cope with real life. If you deliver a character journey where the protagonist suffers and survives and finds meaning, your readers will pay to love and hate your characters.
How have you made characters in your WIP suffer and find meaning?
About Lynette
Lynette M. Burrows is an author, a blogger, a creativity advocate, and a Yorkie Wrangler. She writes thrilling science fiction about women who make courageous choices.
Her Fellowship Dystopia series, My Soul to Keep and If I Should Die, takes place in an alternate 1961. Miranda, the daughter of America’s premier preacher-politician, breaks the rules and discovers the world beyond privilege is far darker and more dangerous than she knew. The third book in this trilogy, And When I Wake, will be published in 2024.
Lynette lives in the land of Oz. When she’s not procrastinating by avoiding housework and playing with her dogs, she’s blogging or writing or researching her next book. You can find Lynette online on her website, Facebook, or on Twitter @LynetteMBurrows.
Images displayed in this post were purchased from DepositPhotos.com.
The best stories are the ones that come alive in a reader's imagination. They pull the reader into the story world and sweep them away in the struggles and dreams of the characters. For us writers, envisioning our stories is the easy part, and the trick is getting what's in our heads onto the page. When we don't, we get a story that falls flat and dies—and who wants that?
One of the best ways to bring our tales to life is to show them, not tell them. Sadly, this is also one of the hardest things for new writers (and some experienced writers), to do. "Showing" is a moving target that varies by which point of view you use, the narrative distance, and even the genre. What works for a first-person literary journey might not work for a multiple third-person thriller.
Luckily, there are techniques that help you better show your scenes no matter what perspective or genre you write in.
1. Create a Strong Point of View
Point of view (POV) is the silver bullet of writing. If you master this, 95% of the common writing problems a writer faces will vanish. A solid point of view puts you (and your readers) firmly in a character's head, seeing the world through their eyes, and experiencing that world as they would naturally experience it.
This lets you to decide which details to use when describing, what actions the character would take, and what they'd think about as they struggle to solve their goals. Seeing the story through a character's eyes means you'll write it as that character sees it, not as you see it. It helps keep you from pulling away and describing (telling) the scene from afar.
For example, a solid point of view changes a detached, flat sentence into something alive and shown:
Weak POV: Sara was so upset that John forgot their anniversary that she threw a vase at him.
Strong POV: Sara heaved the vase at John's head. "Does twelve years mean nothing to you?"
The weak POV explains the situation—it tells what Sara did (throw the vase) and why she did it (she was upset). The strong POV shows how someone in this situation would act—it shows what Sara did (she threw the vase and voiced her unhappiness) and lets readers figure out how she feels by watching her actions.
Writing the scene from inside a character's head allows readers to watch the situation and guess why the characters are acting and how they feel about it all. It makes them part of the story, not a spectator on the sidelines getting a detailed play by play of the action.
Look at your current story—what point of view are you using? Do you have one POV character per scene? Do you show the scene through their eyes? Are you describing things that the POV character wouldn't know or be able to see (common in weak or unfocused POVs)?
Try picking a POV style you're comfortable with and writing the story with that POV. For new writers, it's much easier to pick one or two characters and write from their POVs only. Trying to show the entire story from multiple characters or an omnificent narrator is difficult to do until you get the hang of it.
If you're not sure which POV style you prefer, try writing a scene from both a third person and a first person perspective. Odds are one will feel more natural for you, and for the story itself.
2. Control Your Narrative Distance
Narrative distance is how close readers feel to the story. A close narrative distance makes them feel inside the narrator's head (such as in first person), while a far narrative distance makes them feel as though they're standing off to the side watching (such as in omniscient third person). A closer narrative distance feels more immediate and intimate, as though the story is happening in the moment as the reader reads it. The farther the narrative distance, the more detached and impersonal the story feels.
Where you put your narrator determines how close readers feel to your story. If you're inside the head of a character seeing the world through their eyes, readers will feel a part of the narrative. If you're explaining the story from a distance, readers will be kept at a distance and not connect to the characters the same way.
For example:
Far narrative distance: It's over, Bob thought, realizing she'd never forgive him for hurting her.
Close narrative distance: He sank to the floor, numb. It's over. She'll never forgive me for this.
Narrative distance is closely linked to point of view, as you can see by these examples. The farther the narrative distance, the more detached the point of view feels. The closer the distance, the more personal the POV. The two work in tandem to dramatize (show) the story.
Look at your current story—what narrative distance are you using?
Does it feel like the characters are living the story, or more like someone outside the story explaining what's going on? Does it jump around from close to far depending on what's happening?
Try revising for consistency. Pick a narrative distance you're comfortable with and keep everything in the story at that distance. Some red flag words that often mean you're telling more than showing include: realized, knew, decided, because, and felt. If you see a lot of these words in areas that also feel a little distant, odds are you're telling from a far narrative distance.
If you're not sure what narrative distance you prefer, try writing a scene from both a close and a far distance and see which one reads better, and which is easier for you to write. But remember—the goal isn't to tell readers everything and explain the scene, it's to show them enough details so they can figure out the what and why by observation.
3. Show What the Characters Do, Not What They Intend to Do
Once you have a solid understanding of point of view and narrative distance, you'll be able to show what the characters do and bring the story to life. Stories are about interesting people solving interesting problems in interesting ways. So, show what they do, not what they plan to do.
One of the most common "tells" is to explain motive. My favorite example is simple, yet something writers write every single day:
She reached over to pick up the cup.
Here, we see the action (she reached over) but then the reason why is explained (to pick up the cup). We never actually see her pick it up, because the action isn't described—just the intent to do it. To turn this from told to shown, we'd change one word:
She reached over and picked up the cup.
Now we see the action and can guess that she reached over to pick up the cup, because we see her reach and then pick up the cup.
While this is a small tell (and writers do it all the time), it's a great example of how easy it is to explain motive and not actually show the action in the scene. Some common red flag words for explaining motive include: to [verb], when, decided, because, in order to, and tried.
Not only will showing the action make scenes feel more immediate and alive, they'll keep readers invested in what's going on, because they won't be told everything ahead of time.
For example, if your character thinks, "All I need to do is sneak past the guards and slip out that window and I'll be able to escape," and then you show him sneaking across the room, you lose all the tension. Readers already know the goal (to get to the window and escape) and they assume it'll happen, because you just told them it would. There's no suspense and no reason to keep reading.
But if you just have the character start sneaking and working his way across the room while guards patrol mere feet away and readers aren't told why...then readers will wonder what he's up to and why he's risking getting caught. They'll keep reading to find out. Tension stays high and there's something they want to know—does he escape and how.
Look at your current story—how often are your characters thinking about what they plan to do instead of actually doing it?
Are they "deciding" to act? "Trying" to act? Moving to "do something" but are never shown physically doing it? Revising these simple explanations turn a flat scene with nothing happening into a scene with lots of action.
And don't forget—"action" doesn't mean the life-or-death explosion-heavy scenes from a summer blockbuster movie. Action is just characters physically doing something. If they're interacting with the external world then they're acting, and that keeps the story moving. If they're thinking and describing what they plan to do, they're internal and not doing anything at all.
Try reworking any scenes that feel too internal with the characters thinking and musing instead of acting. Look for ways to dramatize those plans
Showing and not telling is all about making it real for readers. Half the fun of reading is figuring out what's going on and why the characters are behaving as they do. The more we explain those reasons, the less reason readers have to read our stories. But when we show characters acting in intriguing ways and readers have to work to figure out why—they can't stop turning the pages.
For more on showing and not telling, check out my book, Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting it), and learn what show, don't tell means, how to spot told prose in your writing, and why common advice on how to fix it doesn't always work.
What do you struggle with in your writing? What's keeping your scenes from coming alive?
