What was your character like before this event?

In order to properly execute your plot points by showing rather than telling, you need to start by examining how the event will change your character. It could be as simple as changing their mind, perhaps they had a certain plan set in their mind but this event shows them that it’s a bad idea. It could be something big that changes their perception of the world, perhaps a loved one betrays them or they find out a dark secret. Or maybe it changes their perception of themselves, maybe the event shows them that they’re braver or more capable than they previously thought. Either way, a plot point should visibly affect your protagonist in a major way.

How did this event change your character or their trajectory in the story?

There are two ways a plot point can change the trajectory of a story. The first is by fundamentally changing the protagonist themselves, thereby changing any decisions they will make after this point in the story. It could also simply change the trajectory by giving them new information or direction that affects what happens next and the decisions being made.

A plot point doesn’t involve every conversation and scene throughout your book, but rather purely those that lead the protagonist where they need to go to get to your novel’s climax. When you’re writing a scene that can be considered a plot point, make it more obvious to the reader by clearly telegraphing the drama involved. Write in-scene with short and quick sentences so the pacing feels faster. Have your protagonist react to the information or events of the scene through action, mannerisms, changes in dialogue, etc.

What choice did your character make?

Major plot points should always be accompanied by character choice. Don’t make your readers follow a protagonist who lets the world kind of happen to them. Instead, allow your readers to follow someone who is an active participant in the world and in their own story (AKA someone who makes choices). Character choice is, therefore, an excellent way to telegraph to your readers that a major plot point is unfolding in your novel.

When writing a character choice into your plot, make sure to examine it thoroughly. Why is the protagonist making this choice? Does it make sense for them to make this choice? Just because you need your plot to lead a certain direction, doesn’t mean your characters can make choices they wouldn’t make.

How is your character or the events of the story different afterward?

What has changed based on this plot point? From your perspective, likely very little has changed, but you need to put yourself into the minds of your readers. Has their perception of the world you’ve created changed based on the information they’ve learned in this scene? Or was the protagonist about to head somewhere very dangerous when they learned of a different way to accomplish their goal, therefore totally changing the protagonist’s physical trajectory in the plot? Or perhaps a major life event occurs from which the protagonist will spend a significant amount of the book recovering? Think about what has changed for the protagonist based on the scene you’ve created and make sure those changes are telegraphed in the text. Showing, rather than telling, how the story or protagonist has changed will allow readers to see that a major plot point has occurred.

The post Show Don’t Tell: Plot Points appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Decide On a Twist

Whether it be that a character who appears good is secretly a murderer or someone was roped into helping to steal a priceless artifact, you’ll need to figure out what the twist of your story will be. The key thing to remember, though, is that the information itself isn’t the ‘twist’, it’s a crucial piece of action that is backed up by the information.

So, for example, let’s say your twist is that the murderer of your story is secretly a close friend of the protagonist. You must have them reveal themselves through a choice like killing someone in front of your protagonist. Having them monologue the information isn’t a twist, this is what backs up and supports a twist that has already occurred.

Ultimately, before you begin writing your story, you’ll need to decide what the twist will be, the story behind the twist, and how it will be revealed through action.

2) Plot Out Your Story

Next, you’ll need to plot your story in order for it to make sense both from the perspective of knowing and not knowing what the twist will be. You have to make sure the story is logical while your readers are still in the dark, and then also when the shocking twist reveals itself.

If your twist involves a certain character in the story being unlike their outer persona, you’ll need to plot the whole story from both your protagonist’s perspective and theirs. What do they do throughout that alleviates them from suspicion until the end? Why are they doing what they’re doing? Who are they really?

3) Scatter Clues Throughout

As you’re going into writing your story, it can be helpful to leave tiny little almost imperceptible hints throughout. For example, let’s say the murderer is murdering people he feels are responsible for the death of his brother. The protagonist could notice him always wearing a certain gold chain around his neck and later this could be revealed to have come from his brother and serves as a symbol of his dedication to avenging him.

This is a detail that doesn’t feel suspicious in the slightest upon reading so your readers would have no reason to be suspicious, but it also aids the later reveal and shows that you put thought into it if you included this detail early on.

4) Focus On the Choices

As we stated earlier, choice is the key to executing a twist. Therefore you must not only focus on the choice that will eventually reveal the twist, but also the choices being made throughout. This is tricky because it involves a balancing act of sorts. You want the character surrounding the reveal to not be someone under suspicion because otherwise, the twist won’t feel very surprising. At the same time, however, you want their behavior and choices to make sense from the POV of the twist reveal.

It can be helpful to perhaps have a scene that shows them at one scene while the ‘killer’ is on the loose, thereby making it seem as though they’re beyond suspicion. And then you’d later reveal that they did this to throw the police off the scent. Make sure you’re plotting your story well and making sure that all of this person’s movements make sense from every POV while also not allowing them to become an obvious object of suspicion.

5) Revise

As much as you want to believe you’ll nail this on the first try, something this intricate takes multiple drafts. Don’t beat yourself up when the threads inevitably get too tangled or when you hand your first draft to your editor and they notice several areas with plot holes. You need all of the threads to fit together perfectly in order to execute that moment that combines surprise, awe, and satisfaction known as the twist.

The post How to Write a Crazy Twist appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Whose story is it?

A short story is all about creating a satisfying and believable character arc within a finite number of pages. So the last thing you want to do is go back and forth between two POV’s or try to give two characters an arc (trust us, it’s hard enough to do one). Even if you want two characters to be within the central action of the story–even if you want the events of the story to change multiple people in some way–the story should only belong to one character. And that should be the character who is going to be most drastically affected by the events that unfold. Ultimately, if a reader reads your story and can’t answer the question, “Whose story is this?” by the end, you’re doing something wrong.

Why now? Why today?

As we said before, the biggest challenge of a short story is that you basically have to do what a book does in terms of character arc within a short number of pages. Because of this, it’s crucial that you ask yourself- why is this story happening today? When attempting to write a short story, a lot of writers make the mistake of focusing solely on forming an interesting and engaging character and failing to focus on why this day specifically is important to the character’s life as a whole. Character drives plot so of course, it’s important to have an engaging character to carry the story, but the story needs to be happening on an extremely important day in their life.

When reading about this, a lot of writers then make the mistake of thinking that means that a huge event needs to happen in this character’s life. They’ll assume their parents have to get divorced or they need to be involved in a school shooting for the story to be purposeful enough. However, it doesn’t have to be a huge monumental event on the grand scale of things, it simply needs to be a huge monumental event to this specific character.

For example, perhaps the story starts with a character in his fifties and his wife tells him the doctor called to set up a checkup. A reader may assume its something dire, but perhaps this man just has refused to go to the doctor’s for the last thirty years, insisting that they’re wackjobs while secretly just being afraid of finding out something is wrong. Perhaps this is a fight he and his wife have been having annually all of this time. And, by the end of the story, he decides to finally go. To most people an annual check-up with a doctor isn’t life or death- but if it is to the character, then you have a good story.

What does the protagonist want? What is keeping him/her from getting it?

Another core aspect of a short story is character desire. While in a book-length manuscript we say that character drives the plot, in a short story it’s more specifically character desire that drives it. It needs to be made clear right from the beginning what the protagonist of the story wants and they need to want it badly. It’s not engaging to write a wishy-washy character that sort of wants something or might want it, because then the story has nothing at stake. The character has nothing to gain or lose over the course of the events that take place. And to be clear, they can have a negative desire as well. For example, in the above scenario, our main character desperately wants to avoid the doctor–that’s his core desire that drives the plot. In addition, the conflict comes in through whatever forces are keeping the protagonist from getting what they want. For example, in the above scenario, the conflicting force is obvious–the conflict is his wife insisting he go to the doctors.

Choice

Ultimately, the climax of a short story should always be a choice that the protagonist faces. In books, a climax can be a long battle scene or something with a lot of action, but in a short story when the conflict comes to a boiling point it must lead to the character making a choice. And the events of the story up until that point should make it clear what the cost of the choice will be.

The choice can’t be black and white, right or wrong kind of choice, either. It should present two options or paths to the protagonist and we should see that they will gain and lose something no matter what they choose. So let’s take our previous example for instance. Let’s say the story leads to the couple fighting and the wife making it clear that their marriage hangs on the balance of whether he goes to the doctor. In this choice, our protagonist either loses his wife or loses his sense of safety. And he either gains another year of peaceful denial or he gains a wife who feels happy in her marriage.

The post Genre Spotlight: Short Story appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) When handling character development through a scene, there is always what’s on the surface and then what’s beneath the surface. Write a scene about a couple fighting while playing a board game. They’re fighting about the game itself, but what are they really upset about? Use the game itself as a tool to show what’s really upsetting them (ex. They’re upset about money, have them play Monopoly or if they are upset about politics, have them play chess).

2) Another important aspect of character development is being able to show character through action alone. Describe a character walking across an expanse field or lot and describe how they walk and their mannerisms. The reader should perfectly understand your character’s personality simply by the way you describe the walk and actions between one side of the lot and the other.

3) Your characters must go through highs and lows over the course of your book- especially when it comes to what they want most in the story. As an exercise in writing this, describe an hour in the life of a character who has recently lost their ability to do what they love most (a pianist who has severe arthritis; a runner who became a quadriplegic).

4) Your characters will have different reactions to different people throughout your story. This will be based on varying factors such as their personalities and familiarity with a particular character. Write a scene where a stranger stops your main character, saying they know them, and insisting your main character is someone they are not. Describe exactly how this case of mistaken identity makes your character feel. Does this upset your character? Does this make your character insecure or paranoid? Does meeting someone new make them happy?

5) Each character in a story must have their own distinct personality. This means each one will handle situations differently- from a crisis to a mild problem. To practice differentiating between character reactions, write a scene where a risk-averse character is stuck in a hostage situation with a risk-happy character.

6) Showing character through action can get fairly repetitive for most writers. How many different ways can someone shrug or sigh? For the next week, watch strangers carefully and take notes in your phone about any peculiar gestures or body language. Combine the three most interesting ones to describe a character as he/she goes grocery shopping. And keep the rest for later use, you never know when you’ll need them!

7) One of the most important parts of character writing is choice. Your characters must be faced with choices throughout your book so your reader can learn about who they are through their decisions. Write about a character faced with a critical decision. This character, then, witnesses a big event (it could be awe-inspiring or disheartening). Describe and show how witnessing the event helps the character make their decision.

The post 7 Tips to Master Character Development appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.