Writers in the Storm

By Lori Freeland

Whether you’re starting your novel or you’re shoulder-deep in revisions, snacks, and wine, knowing when to hit Enter can take your writing from meh to manuscript-ready.

Paragraphs aren’t just for spacing. They’re for storytelling. A single line break can shift focus, change pacing, or land an emotional hit. The right paragraph tells the reader where to breathe, what to feel, and when to pay attention.

Used well, paragraphing isn’t just structure. It’s voice. It’s rhythm. It’s power. So how do you know when to actually hit Enter? Let’s break it down.

The Art of White Space

Reading a giant paragraph that goes on forever—sometimes pages!—feels like trying to find your black SUV in a parking garage full of black SUVs. Exhausting. Disorienting. And honestly? Many readers won’t even try. They’ll skim and miss potentially important information or some great prose.

Here’s the secret: The words might be the same, but how you break them up changes everything.

White space is more than just aesthetics. It’s a psychological trick that tells your reader, “Hey, this isn’t hard. It’s fun.” Without white space, even great writing feels dense. With it, your story flows. And your reader stays engaged.

A rule of thumb is 4-6 sentences depending on how long they are and what you’re trying to say.

Here’s a visual example:

The Strength of a Stand-Alone Sentence

Stand-alone sentences scream “Notice me!” Use them to set something off, get the reader’s attention, build tension or emotion, highlight a change in story or character direction, or deliver a punchline you’ve been setting up in the scene or story.

The Rule of Clarity

Keep a character’s speech, actions, body language, expressions, and thoughts together unless it gets too long. This makes it easier for the reader to know who’s speaking and doing the action.  

Out with the old. In with the new. The rule used to be new speaker = new paragraph. But that doesn’t give you ideal clarity. The better rule is change of focus = new paragraph.

• Change of Speaker

While we’re expanding the paragraphing rules, the old still stands. Every time someone different has dialogue, you need to paragraph.

Example:

“I’ll be back by curfew.” My sister breezes past, repeating the lie she’s told me all week.

“You know liars go to hell, right?” Aidan calls her out when I don’t.

“Be sure to save me a seat up front.” She shoves her phone into the back pocket of her dark gray jeans and tugs up the hood of her black sweatshirt.

• Different Characters Performing Actions Without Dialogue

Example:

Jerry slammed his hands on the table.

Paul whirled around.

• Change of Physical Focus

This can be inside to outside, to another room, or to another person.

Example:

Outside, the SUV inched forward.

Unease slithered through my gut. I tugged my phone from the waistband of my candy-cane flannels and rubbed my thumb across the dark screen. I could call Dad. But if I ruined the last day of the only vacation he and my mother had taken in ten years, she’d make me pay for the next five.

• Dealing with Dialogue

Readers should never have to guess who’s talking.

• Simple tags can be your friends

“Said” is invisible magic that works when you need something quick. It also helps differentiate when you have a fast back-and-forth between two characters. And you don’t need to keep using it once you’ve established who’s first in the exchange. However, if the conversation goes on a while with no other “speaker” cues, you’ll need to stick it in every so often.

Example:

“I like you,” she said.

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Absolutely.”

“Why?” he asked.

• Beware the adverb parade
  

Example:

“I have to have that candy bar,” I whined loudly.
“Fine!” Ella angrily cried.

Your editor’s soul just died a little. It’s better to show how someone’s speaking than to slap on these kinds of descriptions.

Example:

“I have to have that candy bar.” I dragged the last word out like it might change her mind.

“Fine!” Ella’s voice was sharp enough to cut glass. “Take it.”

• Use action beats

Make the action do double duty and tell the reader who’s speaking.

Example:

“I have to have that candy bar.” I clutched it to my chest.  

“Fine! Take it.” Ella threw up her hands and stalked away.

• Try internal thought

This only works for your point-of-view character because we, as the reader, can only be in one person’s head at a time.

Example:

“Stay.” It’s sounds like I’m begging. Maybe I am.

Leaning into the car, Claire throws my backpack into the passenger seat. “Matt needs me.”

Right. Whatever. Because apparently, I don’t. “Just go then.”

*A note about punctuation.

• Use quotation marks for what people say out loud, NOT what they’re thinking.

Example:

“Hey, let’s catch that movie.” (dialogue)

We should catch that movie. (internal thought)

Side Note: Avoid using words like thought and wondered when possible. They are filter words that pull the reader out of deep point-of-view.

Example:

I thought she looked pretty in that dress. / She looked pretty in that dress.

• Use a comma and a lowercase letter with a dialogue tag.

Example:

“I’m in,” she said.

• Use a period and a capital letter with everything else.

Example:

“I’m in.” She grabbed her bag. (action)

“Don’t do that.” Her voice rose. (dialogue cue that’s not a tag like said)

“Sure. I can do that.” Not gonna happen. (internal thought)

• Use an em dash for interruptions.

Example (cutting someone off):

“I just think—”
“Don’t think,” she snapped.

Example (interrupting dialogue in the middle):

Old school: (commas)
“I think,” she said, “you should go.”

New School: (em dashes)
“I think”—she looked away—“you should go.”

Note that the em dashes go OUTSIDE of the parentheses, and you don’t use a comma.

(Two hyphens + no space before next word = em dash magic.)

Final Thoughts

With smart paragraphing, your story has room to breathe and so does the reader. Paragraph with purpose. Because clean, intentional writing doesn’t just keep readers reading—it keeps them feeling. And that’s the goal, right?

What’s your paragraphing pet peeve or your favorite line-break power move? Drop it in the comments!

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About Lori

Lori Freeland wrote her first story at age five. It wasn’t good, but it left her with the belief that everyone has a story to tell. An author, editor, and writing coach, she writes everything from articles to novels, has taught at conferences across the country, and helped many new writers find their voices. A mood reader, she loves happy endings, thrills and chills, unexpected twists, and anything a little weird—as long as it has a touch of romance. When she’s not curled up on the couch with her husband and her dog drinking too much coffee, you can find her messing with the lives of the imaginary people living inside her head.

lorifreeland.com (young adult & contemporary romance fiction) 

lafreeland.com (inspirational blog & resources for writers) 

The Accidental Boyfriend was an Amazon #1 New Release, a ReaderViews Bronze Award Winner, and a Publisher’s Weekly BookLife Prize Finalist.

Jess is everything Gabe wants. Gabe is everything Jess doesn’t know she needs. After celebrity heartthrob Gabe unknowingly hijacks homeschooled Jess’s first kiss, he decides she could be the perfect decoy to throw off the paparazzi. If he can convince her to play his girlfriend of the week. Keeping the impossible promise he made his mom depends on it. Only Jess isn’t about to be anyone’s fangirl and wants nothing to with TV's hottest hairball or his Hollywood ego.

Header photo - Tom Hermans - Unsplash

Every writer hears these three rules: “write what you know,” “bleed on the page,” and “show, don’t tell.” Since those rules don’t tell you how to use them in storytelling, many writers turn to classes or books to learn how. They learn skills that are helpful. But those skills won’t forge an emotional connection with your readers. For that, you need three unique and interrelated skills: knowing what you feel, knowing the best words to use, and the willingness to share raw and honest feelings. This post shares information and suggestions on how writers can develop these three skills.

Knowing What You Feel

Humans are born with the capacity to experience and express basic emotions. Researchers have observed happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust in infants across all cultures. These inborn emotions are identifiable through specific, recognizable facial expressions. But understanding, regulating, and labeling our emotions are skills we must learn. A wide range of factors—trauma, emotionally distant parents, depression, anxiety, mental health conditions, environmental, societal, and cultural factors, educational factors, biological factors, and more—influence how well you develop your skills in understanding, regulating, and labeling emotions. It’s a wonder anyone can know what they feel.

When you know a character’s personality and why it’s there, you’ll have what you need to write their behavior authentically. - Angela Ackerman

Most of us have grown up with the notion that there are positive emotions and negative emotions. That is true in that we have biological and mental responses we interpret as positive or negative. But emotions are our body’s way of communicating with us. For us to understand what that message is, we must first be aware. For writers, this is crucial to being able to convey characters’ emotions in a believable way.

Mindfulness

The first step is to increase your emotional awareness is to be mindful of your own. Listen to your body, your self-talk, and pay attention to the circumstances you’re in. Big feelings are easier to identify at first. So, if you’ve not included this in your writing practice before—start there. Write it all down. Describe what happened, what emotions you experienced, and where on or in your body you experienced those emotions first. Try to describe the intensity of your feelings.

If you feel too exposed having your feelings in writing, you can lock it up (passwords for digital files, physical locks on journals or boxes to keep journals in). You can also write a first entry advising anyone who reads your journal that these are exercises you are doing to improve your craft. Some writers have included the destruction of their journals in their last will and testament. Do whatever allows you to be raw and 100% honest in your journal. 

Blind Spots and Triggers

We all have emotional blind spots and triggers. 

Blind spots are areas where you lack insight into your emotions or the emotional impact you have on others. Blind spots create opportunities for character development, conflict, dramatic irony, and much more. You can reveal them as your character’s boundaries or flaws. Your characters can be completely unaware of them or develop an awareness of them over the course of your story.

Triggers are things (words, events, places, etc.) that you respond to with strong emotional responses. You probably already use emotional triggers in your writing. In scenes where one character betrays another, or falls in love, or dies, you create emotional triggers for your readers. You can add depth to characters with emotional triggers based on wounds from the character's past or with new triggers based on events in the story.

Understanding and identifying your own blind spots and triggers opens a hidden world of emotion and awareness you can create for your characters. Overdone, these things will read as melodrama. If the blind spots and triggers are unrelated to anything else in your story, or only appear once, readers will find it odd or inconsequential. Striking the right balance is key.

Emotional Literacy

Emotions are a complex mix of what goes on in our heads and hearts and our physical responses.

A writer who is emotionally literate has awareness, can label emotions appropriately, has a basic understanding of what triggers these emotions, and understands how emotions affect behavior, decision making, empathy, and interactions (social and personal). Without at least a basic understanding of these things, crafting believable and relatable characters will be much more difficult.

We learn the labels we give our emotions over a lifetime. Often they are imprecise or contain connotations specific to where we grew up, who our parents were, their background, cultural influences, and societal influences. Sometimes we simplify our emotions down to basics when they are much more complex.

It’s no wonder that most humans are not great at labeling their emotions. not even all psychologists agree upon how many emotions all humans experience. There are theories that say there are six and others that say eight.

Fortunately, there are tools writers can use to help them identify emotions and express them through concrete details.

The Emotion Wheel

The Emotion Wheel is a visual representation of emotions created in 1980 by an American psychologist, Robert Plutchik, to help patients identify eight core emotions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, anticipation, surprise, disgust, and trust. Other psychologists narrowed those down to six core emotions. Whether you use Plutchik's eight core emotions wheel or the six core emotion one, the design of the wheel places each emotion’s polar opposite on the opposite side. Example: joy is in the position opposite of sadness. 

Between each emotion on the wheel is another emotion that combines two adjoining emotions. For example: between anticipation and joy is optimism. Between anger and anticipation is aggressiveness.

The wheel goes even further. Not only does it give the emotions that are combinations of feelings, it also identifies degrees of emotion. For example, anger can range from annoyance to full-blown rage. Anticipation can go from mild interest to vigilance.

You can find more information about the emotion wheel online in videos and blogs. And you can buy your own wheel at online retailers. 

The wheel is not perfect, but as a tool it can help you figure out the range and progression of your characters’ emotional responses.

Turning Your Emotions into a Character’s Emotions

When you have kept a journal of the range of your emotions, the stimuli that triggered those emotions, and where you experienced them in your body, you have an invaluable took that will help you “write what you know” even when you have never been in that exact situation. For example, you have never experienced a lover’s betrayal, but you have experienced betrayal by a co-worker. With concrete details in your journal, you can use them to portray or extrapolate what being betrayed by a lover could feel like. Based on your authentic experiences, you have a much better chance of making your reader feel that sense of betrayal is real.

When you mine your journal, your emotions, for those concrete details, you can get into a rut of sameness. That’s not surprising. You experience your emotions in a certain way every time. To avoid all your characters having the same concrete details of emotions, use an emotion thesaurus. I (among many of the Writers In the Storm Blog Hosts) recommend The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi. Its entries include the definition, a list of physical responses, internal responses, mental responses, signs of acute or long-term experiences, and signs of repression, and additional writer’s tips.

The key to turning any emotion into something that feels real to your reader is in which concrete details you use and when because you have experienced something similar.

The Problem with Using Tools

As a writer, you can use tools like the Emotion Wheel but it may not give you the authenticity your readers crave. Unless you are vulnerable enough to educate yourself, to be aware of your own emotions and their underpinnings, you won't recognize when your characters feelings (and how they express them) are not quite relatable.

Is that a problem? It depends on your characters and the story you want to write. You will create a stronger connection between your characters and your readers if you are vulnerable enough to share concrete details from your own personal journey.

Emotional Awareness is Your Author SuperPower

What we do, say, and believe lines up with who we are and what shaped us. - Angela Ackerman

Your awareness of your emotions is a crucial step to using the power of emotions in storytelling. Writers are people. And as people, some of us may lack awareness of nearly all but the most basic emotions, while others of us might know every tiny nuance of their emotions. Awareness launches your journey toward emotional storytelling, but to deliver those emotions authentically in your writing requires more. You’ll need emotional literacy to pinpoint and express precise emotions at critical moments. And perhaps most importantly, you need to be vulnerable enough to express your rawest and most honest emotions. These interconnected elements—awareness, literacy, and vulnerability—get stronger the more you develop and sharpen them. It’s a lifelong personal and professional journey. It’s not a journey every writer needs to take in order to sell their work. But it is a journey that might be worth your time and energy both personally and professionally.

Has recording or studying psychology or your own emotions been a helpful part of your writing life?

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About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, writing coach, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. Her stories weave her experiences into speculative fiction stories that balance character growth with thrilling action and social themes. 

My Soul to Keep is book one of an alternate history dystopian trilogy about a young woman of privilege who in her desperation to avoid her pre-planned life, escapes and ends up in a no-win situation. She faces a choice: return to suffocate under the rules of her society or fight for her country and her life. Book One, My Soul to Keep, and Book Two, If I Should Die, are available at your favorite online book seller. Book Three, And When I Wake, will be published in December 2025.

When Lynette’s not writing she avoids housework and plays with her two yorkies. They live in Dorothy’s home state of Kansas. You can follow Lynette on her website or her Facebook page or Sign up for her newsletter.

Image Credits

Smiley image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay

Emotion wheel is courtesy of Ainrvteers Emotion Wheel on Amazon.

by Holly Lasky

Optimize Creativity While Navigating the Ups and Downs of Life

In writing this blog, I was struck by the title of this group, which is “Writers in the Storm”. In the “about” section of this blog, it states, “Along the way, we’ve discovered that there’s more to life than writing, and sometimes life can be the richest story of all… Every writer must weather the storm within: self doubt, rejection, deadlines and balancing our writing passion with everyday life. Not to mention the storm raging outside — the paradigm shift in the publishing industry.”

Speed bumps on the writing journey.

It is exciting to consider when we are in the ups and downs of the storms of life, our creativity can be an expression of the journey.

• How can we bring “The richest story of all” into our writing? 
• What happens when those ups and downs don't feel very manageable or we're in crisis mode and all of a sudden our best intentions go sideways? 
• What do we do when our carefully, meticulously plotted schedule takes a left turn and we find ourselves at the end of a very busy day and yet we haven't accomplished any of the things we wanted to accomplish? 
• Instead of being tossed around in the storm, what would happen if we could ride the waves and be empowered instead of drowning?

It's easy to feel frustrated and beat ourselves up and think there's something wrong with:

• Our ability to focus. 
• Our ability to organize. 
• Being able to do what we love in our creative expressions, be it writing or anything else. 

Andy Andrews said, “If you're not in a crisis right now, you've just come out of one or you're about to be in one.” 

This idea of crisis, or ups and downs as a way of life can take on new meaning for us. It's important as we navigate these times to have tools and strategies so when we are in moments of:

• Overwhelm 
• Crisis 
• In the middle of those days that just go completely wrong. 

There are ways to: 

• Create momentum. 
• Spark our creativity.
• Encourage ourselves. 
• Be empowered in the choices we're making.

In part one, we took a look at the tools of:  

• Breathing techniques.    
• Getting out of overwhelm.
• Eat That Frog for 90 minutes a day 

Let’s examine three more tools that can be instantly incorporated into your daily creative life.

The idea of optimizing creativity when things are not going well in life is a priority. Often in those moments, it seems like time is slowing down or stopped, whether dealing with a loss or illness or the car broke down and you're stuck by the side of the road. Whatever it is that causes your day, your week, your month to not be what you expected it to be, we can get unstuck by taking daily small steps. The small decisions every day compound into massive growth, change, and progress in our life.

Grace

• We tend to be very unkind to ourselves. 
• We say unkind things to ourselves. 
• We are more kind to the people around us than we usually are to ourselves. 

This is where we can have grace for ourselves. 

Grace for Ourselves

• We're NOT broken.
• We haven’t done anything wrong. 
• We're not  terrible people. 
• We're not lazy or unmotivated.

Getting things done and optimizing AND being creative is a process. We have days where more happens and days where less happens. One Client came down with flu symptoms. It turns out, they were avoiding a confrontative conversation with a key person in their life. The moment they showed themselves grace and then took responsibility for their actions, their flu symptoms were immediately gone. 

As we begin to understand what's driving us consciously and unconsciously we can have a lot more compassion for ourselves.

95% of our brain is unconscious and 3 to 5% is conscious. The 95%, the unconscious mind, is driving everything. Consciously we may be trying to be super productive, get stuff done and hit our word count for the day. All of a sudden we find ourselves staring out the window or watching Netflix or completely avoiding whatever it is we need to do by doing something else. Whatever it may be, there can be other things driving it. 

The First Step

The first step is awareness. Are you in a pattern or a habit that isn't working for you? We default to these patterns, not because they work anymore, they worked maybe once upon a time, it's just that they're familiar and comfortable. Well, familiar and maybe uncomfortable, but they're still familiar. We are creatures of habit and we default to whatever is familiar. Often where we go in stress is the familiar places of childhood trauma. 

One of the things that inspires me about being a coach is helping people gain that outside perspective to figure out why it is that they're not finishing their book or finishing the edit or coming up with their next great idea. Usually it is rooted deep in early childhood. Beyond understanding where it came from, we can have resolution. 

• What if our creativity was fueled by wholeness and healing and love?
• What if our creativity was fueled by our growth journey? 
• What if our creativity was powered by something bigger than our old story of the terrible and unfortunate things that have happened to us?

This is such an interesting perspective because resolution comes consciously and unconsciously when we look back and learn the lessons of the past, apply them to the present day and then take what we want into the future.

Consult Your Future, Next Best Version of Yourself 

When we say we want something, it is negative because we're going towards something we don't have. One of the practices I like is to consult my future whole, healed, empowered, next best version of myself. When I'm making a decision or casting a vision for the next thing I'm doing or working on a creative project, or what is the next best step, all of these, I take a moment, breathe, and then ask my future self:

• What would she do?
• What would she be eating for breakfast? 
• What would she be working on? 
• How would she prioritize this project? 
• What's important to her? 

Instead of this being somewhere way out in the future, this is now. Calling my future best self into right now creates empowered choices from a more healed perspective. What is she going to do? Is she going to binge watch Netflix? My future best self is going to sit down and prioritize the project and work through the next step. This is one of my favorite tools to get out of being stuck.

Divine Economy-Our life is happening for us, not to us

The last idea to consider is something Danilo Bridgens, the Founder of Via Vetera, calls the economy of God. Regardless of your spiritual context and beliefs, you should consider that nothing in our life is wasted. In the ups and the downs, in all the things we are unconsciously and consciously choosing in our life, not only is there hope of actual resolution, there's also the hope and the promise that we can learn, we can take forward into the future, we can call into now the person we are becoming.

The past, the present and the future begin to merge together - our healed self from the past, our healed self in the moment, now consulting our best self in the future. We begin to form a partnership within ourselves when we understand it's not about defining things as good or bad or up or down, they just are. Everything happening in our lives is because there's a lesson to be learned and growth to work through. We can empower ourselves by choosing what we bring into the present and future.

In coaching, it is really amazing to help people bring up to the conscious level, these long-running patterns and strategies that don't work, that keep them in the overwhelm, keep them in non-productivity, keep them in the workaholic mindset. This is where we perhaps take on the belief I've got to work harder to be successful. What if success came easily and effortlessly because you're doing something you love and you're passionate about? 

The Current Crisis - Growth Opportunity

Andy Andrews was right. If you're not in a crisis, you've just come out of one or you're about to go into one. As I was deciding what to write about for this blog, I realized this is exactly the perfect thing to write about because I am in a crisis personally.

The last 18 months have been a journey of 3 emergency rooms, 3 hospitals, 3 skilled nursing/rehab facilities and 5 ambulance rides as my husband is experiencing a catastrophic illness and a very long-term recovery. As the medical advocate, caregiver, domestic glue and CEO working full time in this season, I am using every tool in these articles and more. Also, I'm working with several coaches in my life who are helping me see the things that I can't see by myself, so I continue to grow and become the next best version of myself, even as my world is pretty stormy. 

Consider the possibility! There are tools and ways to move forward and understand the deeper core issues that are driving you. Through coaching, there's a way to resolve them. Even the things that seem like they're not going to change, will change. 

As we grow, the world changes around us and people around us change. Say it the way you want it. Step into your next best self right now and you will discover as I have, everything is possible, even in the most challenging times of our lives. Our life becomes the richest story of all.

Questions and Journal Prompts to Consider:

• Are you in a crisis, just come out of one or about to go into one?
• What are your strategies, patterns and ways of coping?
• Are your current strategies, patterns and coping working or not working?
• What is fueling your creativity?
• Write a description of your next best future version of yourself.

Check out the link below and join us for a free workshop:

“Empower Your Unconscious Mind: Get What You *Really* Want Now”   
https://linktr.ee/HollyLasky

About Holly

Holly is an Internationally Certified Master Coach, Professional Musician, Writer, International Speaker, Encourager & Founder of Aligned Optimum Vitality Coaching. Holly coaches Executives, Entrepreneurs, Coaches, High Performers & Creatives in eliminating blocks and trauma in the areas of life they most need & then create  intuitive, congruent goals. Holly helps her Clients achieve repeatable, optimum results without rah-rah motivational & accountability coaching, toxic positivity, unnecessary & unproductive busywork & years of therapy. 

You didn’t come this far to only come this far!

Click this link to learn more and to connect: https://linktr.ee/HollyLasky

Let’s chat and get clarity on what’s blocking you. Interested in one-on-one coaching or our new group coaching program? Click the link above to reserve time on my calendar.

Images from Pixabay