Take a character from your manuscript, for example, any character you choose. How would they handle the early hours of Halloween Eve when the kids come knocking. Are they the type of person who couldn’t be more excited? Perhaps they went to the store and bought three different types of candy because they weren’t sure what kind the kids would like most. Perhaps they have an elaborate costume of their own and they’ve decked their house out in spider webs, gravestones, flashing lights, and fake blood. And, for the entirety of trick-or-treating hours, they are perched on their porch with a huge smile on their face asking the kids about their costumes and telling them how cool they look.

On the other hand, perhaps your character is not much of a Halloween fanatic. They care enough to go grab a bag of candy from the store to prevent their house from getting egged, but they aren’t going to be spending their Halloween interacting with a bunch of snot-nosed kids. They’re the type to set out the candy on their porch in a giant bowl with a sign that says ‘take one’ to which each of the kids will take two. They spend the early hours of their Halloween evening prepping for a party with friends later while listening to the kids laughing and screaming in the distance.

Additionally, your protagonist could be decidedly anti-Halloween, promptly shutting off all the lights in their house at 6:00 PM sharp. Or perhaps they come up with a clever plan to deter future trick-or-treaters by gaining a reputation as the house with bad candy, finding the most obscure and off-putting candy at the store and excitedly handing them out to the neighborhood children.

Creating a scene that forces your character to both interact with children and participate in a holiday can give you an excellent opportunity to get to know your character better. This type of exercise can be used to highlight how they feel about children, holidays, ceremony, merriment, family, privacy, and how they prefer to spend their time. Think about different themes within your manuscript or different aspects of your character’s personality you’re attempting to highlight. Focus on attempting to feature those things in this exercise.

Writing Prompt: Choose a character from your manuscript and write a scene where they are handing out candy to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. You can either make this scene timeless or you can set it in a significant year in your character’s life. Attempt to convey different aspects of your character’s personality through this event. How do they feel about trick-or-treaters and why? For example: if they don’t like trick-or-treaters, are they dissatisfied with their family or the lack of family in their life? How do they feel about the holiday in general and why? How would they spend their time (if they could choose) and why? And how do all of these factors affect the chain of events that evening?

The post Writing Prompt: Trick-Or-Treat appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Strange Happenings

One way to hint to your reader that your protagonist is ‘the chosen one’ is to have strange occurrences happening around them. Perhaps someone is after them and they keep narrowly avoiding death. A stray hockey puck is flung toward their head while they’re watching their friend play or a car almost hits them out of nowhere while they’re on the sidewalk. A near-death experience happening once can be life-altering, but when it happens repetitively the reader will start to suspect something more is going on.

There is a wide array of strange external events that can signal to the reader that a character may be ‘the chosen one’. Perhaps a man in a trench coat has been following your character everywhere for the past few weeks. Or maybe it has rained everywhere they go for the past month. Maybe they’re having a string of bad luck from breaking mirrors to seeing black cats, to a series of injuries. Or even the opposite, a string of good luck where they seem to magically be getting everything they wanted out of nowhere.

These strange happenings, ranging from the bizarre to the supernatural, can hint to the reader that something more is happening with a certain character. This will help make sense of the ‘chosen one’ reveal when it happens.

Inner Qualities

Just as there should be external evidence of your character being ‘the chosen one’, there should be internal evidence as well. This could come in the form of strange occurrences happening within your character. Maybe they sit down to have cereal for breakfast and their spoon seems to come to their fingers as if by magic. Perhaps they’re laying in bed at night, thinking of a certain place they’d like to be, and then all of a sudden they find themselves there. Or even that they’re thinking about getting a haircut when suddenly they realize their hair has morphed into exactly what they were thinking.

This could also involve setting up the personal traits that help make this character ‘the chosen one’. Things like empathy, compassion, kindness, bravery, resourcefulness- these are traits that ‘the chosen one’ has, regardless of the story and context. Setting your character up to have these traits, even to have them in nontraditional ways, can allow your reader to anticipate where the story is going and also to gain an appreciation for your character.

For example, let’s say your chosen character isn’t an outwardly sweet and benevolent person, but we get a small scene where they give the last piece of their sandwich to a stray dog. This hints at the idea that they’re more like a chosen one than they may first appear.

Friendships/Relationships

Another way to show rather than tell your readers that your character is ‘the chosen one’ is to utilize that character’s friendships, family, and relationships. One way they can be utilized is to further highlight the character’s ‘chosen one’ traits. For example, your character can have a conversation where they give their friends sage advice and their friend expresses gratitude toward them. This scene, or a similar one, will highlight how your character is benevolent through action, rather than by directly telling the reader.

The friends and relationships of ‘the chosen one’ can also be useful in that they can be used to further highlight some of the strange happenings surrounding the character. Let’s say one character is with your protagonist for multiple strange happenings, they can point out the various linking events through dialogue with your protagonist. On a character level, this will allow your protagonist to have their suspicions confirmed. It will also provide further confirmation of bizarre events for the reader.

Finally, the relationships between ‘the chosen one’ and other characters can be used as a strange event in and of themselves. Perhaps everyone starts treating the protagonist differently all of a sudden, whether in a positive or negative light. They will start to wonder what is wrong with all of their friends or family, which will then prompt their suspicions and make the ‘chosen one’ reveal pay off.

The post Show Don’t Tell: The Chosen One appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Oftentimes, writing simple scenes can be one of the best ways to practice showing rather than telling how a character is feeling. For example, take the act of exchanging gifts at Christmas. Writing a scene like this will allow you to gain more insight into your character in a few ways. Firstly, the gifts themselves can reflect both on the character giving and receiving the gift. Does character A know character B well enough to get them a gift they’d actually enjoy? And, if so, what would that gift be? And secondly, writing about the exchanging of gifts in-scene allows you to play with characters’ reactions to show the reader whether or not they are excited about the gift.

For example, let’s say character A gets character B a pair of socks. If they’re the type of person who would like a pair of fun socks, they’ll exclaim excitedly, thank character A, and perhaps try them on right away. If that isn’t the kind of gift they’d enjoy, however, they may speak slowly, use phrases like ‘this is interesting’, and wear a strained smile that doesn’t quite meet your eyes. Whether or not character A even notices the reaction is another telling character moment as well- is character A intuitive enough to notice what the audience can clearly see?

Writing such a scene will also allow you to play around with a family dynamic as well. As a writer, your goal should be to be able to establish the nature of relationships as quickly and concisely as possible. Which family members are closest? Who is friends with whom? Is anyone currently fighting or is there any tension underscoring the current family dynamic? These are all questions that can be answered through a simple gift exchange.

Writing Prompt: Write a scene (either with characters from your manuscript or new ones) where a family or a group of friends are exchanging gifts on Christmas. Use the different beats and moments in the gift exchange to establish the characters as individuals, their relationship dynamics, and to make their reactions clear to the reader by showing rather than telling.

The post Writing Prompt: Gift Exchange appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Build the Family

When you’re writing a story about a family, it’s important to create a detailed picture of that family. Is it the stereotypical Mom, Dad, son, and daughter picture? Is it a little boy being raised by his aunt and grandma? Is it twins who live with their adoptive parents, but are close with their adoptive aunt and uncle and visit them frequently? Everyone’s family looks different, think about how your protagonist’s family looks, who they consider their immediate vs. extended family, and why.

2) Personalities

After you’ve figured out what their family looks like, you’ll need to dive into each character’s personality. Does their Mom smother them with love or is she somewhat distant? Is their Dad a workaholic or does he have any strange hobbies like building ships in bottles? Is their sibling the type to shut themselves in their rooms or the type that is nosy, needing to know everyone’s business? Give each member of the family their own unique personality, idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, and interests.

3) Relationships

Once you have an idea of each family member’s personality, it’s time to delve into each relationship on an individual level. Let’s take a family that has a mother, father, daughter, and son living at home. Perhaps the son and daughter don’t get along well and are constantly fighting one another for the bathroom or at the dinner table. Though they don’t get along with each other, maybe the son gets along well and confides in his mom and the daughter to her dad. And perhaps these confidences cause a strain in the relationship between the mom and dad as they disagree with who is at fault in arguments when they’re both getting different sides of the story. A lot of different relationship dynamics can be at play within a single household, as well as with extended family.

4) Conflict

Conflict is at the heart of storytelling, it’s how the plot will continue to progress. After you’ve got the basics of the relationship dynamics down, it’s time for you to create more specific situations with higher stakes. For example, let’s say the sister steals the brother’s donut so, to retaliate, the brother prank calls her crush. This is something that could affect her life at school, so the stakes are higher for her if he does some damage. And they aren’t simply high because he could embarrass her, but him doing this could further damage their relationship.

And conflict doesn’t always have to be so direct. It could be something like a husband using the bathroom and the wife asking if she can have it because she’s in a hurry. He says he’s almost done and she says OK and walks away. You can feel the tension here and you can feel her frustration, but it doesn’t lead to an outright fight it’s indirect.

5) Settings

Conflict will continue to build among family members in your story, until either information comes out or there is a setting for the conflict to boil over into a fight. This setting could be at a familial gathering such as thanksgiving, but it could also be at mom’s work party, cousin’s wedding, on vacation, etc. It should be a setting where it simultaneously makes sense for information or conflict to arise, while also being an incredibly inopportune time for it to do so.

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

Where and how you choose to spend your holidays can say a lot about you. Thanksgiving in particular can say a lot about your personality and relationships since it is a holiday that centers around togetherness, food, and family. It can give your readers or even you those same new insights about your characters.

For example, let’s say one year a character elects to go see friends instead of going to their Aunt’s like they normally do at Thanksgiving. This could indicate that they may have a strained relationship with their family right now and that may make a friend dinner have higher stakes and pressure for a fun evening.

On the other hand, perhaps the character just generally has a super combative family. Thanksgiving, then, becomes the perfect setting to bring them together and show all of the different relationships at play and how your character relates or feels about each of them individually. Your protagonist’s extended family may not even be a part of your story or your outline, but exploring a scene like this could unlock an interesting dynamic that may be worth including in your manuscript.

Writing Prompt: Pick a particularly eventful thanksgiving in your protagonist’s life. It could be a year when they were a child or a year that will take place during the events of your story. How does your protagonist spend the holiday? What family members or friends are present and what is the nature of their relationship with your protagonist? What events take place over the course of the evening? What interesting conversations are overheard or which games are played or what does your protagonist learn when catching up with their extended relatives?

The post Writing Prompt: Thanksgiving Dinner appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Honesty

Believe it or not, painting yourself as the unabashed hero of your own story will make you very unlikeable to readers. They know you’re the author, so they’ll be going into reading your book with the thought that perhaps your story could be a little biased. You’ll want to cut off that thought as quickly as possible if you want your story to feel believable to your readers. In addition, people have a much easier time empathizing with people who can admit their mistakes and learn from them. As much as you may be tempted to do otherwise, do not embellish or alter the facts to try to make yourself appear more likable. You’ll be robbing your readers of the chance to learn from you and, trust us, they won’t thank you for it.

2) Include more than just your story

Although a memoir focuses on a specific portion of your life that affected or changed you in a way readers could learn from- it’s not all about you. If your memoir feels like a bad first date where the person can’t shut up about themselves, your readers are going to fake an emergency to escape your ego. Instead of solely focusing on how you were feeling from moment to moment during this time of your life, make sure you’re also including the motivations of the people around you. If those people are still part of your life (once you’ve got your Outline done), interview them about the specific scenes in which they’re included. Perhaps they remember things differently than you, this may either help jog your memory or allow you to include a present voice that would give your memoir an interesting layer.

Make sure you remember that, ultimately, your readers want to learn from your experience- that’s why they’re reading your book. So instead of focusing on yourself, focus on what lessons you can impart to your readers.

3) Write In-Scene

As we’ve stated previously, you’ll need to employ the techniques of fiction writers to tell your story effectively. If people wanted a distant third-person narrative of your life, they would be looking for your autobiography (which you’d likely only write if you were a celebrity or for a family legacy). Memoir readers want a scene-by-scene close account of your story. They want specific dialogue, flashbacks, character arcs, emotion, etc. If this isn’t your strong suit, it may be prudent to take some Fiction Workshop classes to brush up on your scene writing or to work with a Writing Coach. Fiction writing may hold no interest for you, but brushing up on basic scene-writing technique is crucial for writing a memoir that will hold your reader’s interest.

4) Clear Character Motivation

Going along with our second point, make sure you understand every character’s motivation clearly when you go into writing the story. You don’t have to include the motivation of each character in every scene, but having that awareness will allow you to write them as real well-rounded characters rather than simply secondary characters in your story. The more real everyone feels, the more believable your story is and the more your readers will engage and learn from it. If you no longer speak to some of the people that appear during the period of your life in which your story takes place, try to imagine what their motivation may have been. If you paint some of the characters as simply “being a jerk”, not only is that not motivation but that character (and you by extension) will feel less real to your readers.

5) Did your ending happen yet?

Before you go into writing your memoir, consider whether you’re ready to write it yet. How does your story end? What did you learn from this period of your life? Does it feel well-rounded and complete when you outline it? Readers can smell a revenge book from a mile away and, trust us, they have absolutely no interest in reading one. If you’re still in the thick of healing or overcoming from the period of your life in which you’re focusing, perhaps your story isn’t finished yet. And, if you go into writing it when it’s not finished, your voice will feel biased and memoir readers won’t be as engaged with your work.

The post Writing For Your Audience: Memoir appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

1) Erasers (Delete Key)

Oh, erasers. Thank you for saving us from our typos and all of the embarrassingly bad prose we’ve immediately regretted. Thanks to you, we don’t have to toss out the whole draft everytime we use the wrong form of ‘their’ when we haven’t had enough coffee yet. Speaking of which…

2) Coffee (or Tea)

Sweet sweet (and not so sweet) Coffee, thank you for giving us life. For helping us stay awake long past our bedtimes to finish the sections of our book we just had to get down before they slip away. Thank you, also, for helping us the next day when we need to work our day jobs without falling asleep at our desks. You give us strength when our frail human bodies have none left. You keep our eyes open in times of need. Bless you.

3) Spellcheck

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you, spellcheck. Though we have been blessed with creative minds, we sadly have not been blessed with perfect spelling and grammar (much as we may wish otherwise). Thank you for poking us with that red squiggly line and keeping us from embarrassing ourselves time and time again.

Thank you to our dear editors. This thank you is especially necessary because half of the time we can’t stand you guys (sorry). You take your editor axes and chop up our book babies and we have to sit there and watch it happen. Does this not sound grateful enough? All jokes aside, we know we fight you tooth and nail on every cut, but our book wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is without your hard work. Thank you for seeing what we miss and being tougher than we can ever be.

5) Google

This is a big one- THANK YOU GOOGLE. Because of you, we don’t need to spend hours in the library just to resolve one solitary plot point like the writers of old. The ease with which we can now look up old cold cases or political happenings or the science behind space travel has changed the writing game. Researching is such an important part of writing but, thanks to you, it takes a heck of a lot less time. Thank you for your service.

6) Our friends/family

To our friends and family, we are also truly grateful. Thank you for putting up with us. Thank you for understanding when we cancel plans last minute for an urgent writing night. Thank you for knowing we still love you when we don’t text you back for weeks because we’re so deep into our fantasy novel that we forgot the outside world still exists. Thank you for encouraging us in a career path that everyone else says will leave us living in a cardboard box. Thank you for forcing us out of the house when we have a nasty case of writer’s block (or we just haven’t seen sunlight in weeks). Thank you for listening to us talk about imaginary people for hours on end and pretending you care. We know we’re not the easiest people to deal with at times, but thank you for loving us all the same.

7) Our characters

To our characters AKA our real friends- thank you. Thank you for presenting yourselves to us and for allowing us the privilege of witnessing your lives. We feel honored to have witnessed your elation, struggles, desires, adventures, triumphs, losses, and so much more. We’ve grown to love you so much and can only hope we’ve done justice to what we’ve seen by jotting it all down. No matter how hard we try to the contrary, we’ll always know you much better than our readers ever will. Thank you for being a part of us and allowing us to be a part of you.

8) Strangers

Darling strangers, thank you so much. Thank you for allowing us to spy on you for hours on end with little to no repercussions. Thank you for your mannerisms, your quirks, your style, your gestures, and your words- because we stole all of them. Thank you for being so specifically weird that you vastly improve the quality of our writing. Without you, our writing wouldn’t be nearly as realistic and interesting. Thank you for allowing us to witness your bizarre majesty and for being oblivious enough not to notice us staring and hanging on your every word.

9) Our enemies

This is a weird one, but hear us out. Yes, you are all terrible. But, thanks to you, our books have some really great villains. We’ll go to our graves denying it, but our villains are definitely based (at least in part) on you guys. Without you ruining our lives with your horribleness, our villains wouldn’t be nearly as specific and awful as they are. Our readers love to hate our villains, all thanks to you. So are we happy you exist? No. Did you finally do something good though? Sort of. So we sort of thank you for it.

10) Our notebooks/phones

We thank you both so very much. Without you guys, we would never remember half of the stuff our fickle brains come up with. Our ideas are so fleeting and brief, but you guys are always right there with us so we can jot them down before they slip away. Thank you for holding all of our crazy ideas, keeping them safe from harm, and for having them ready just when we need them most. We know we don’t always treat you the best. We drop you, we tear out your pages, we scribble and get so disorganized that you lose all sense of purpose. But, if we ever lost you, it would be like losing a part of ourselves.

11) Books

We may tear up a bit on this one, but thank you, books. You were and will always be the first and greatest love of our lives. You are the reason we fell in love with writing. You are also the reason we got good at writing and you still improve both our writing and our lives to this day. You’ve taught us about life, love, family, culture, history, imagination, and what it means to be human. Ironic as it is, there are no words to express our gratitude toward you.

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The post 11 Things Writers Are Grateful For appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.