Character Depth

Quick Link: Supplying Breadcrumbs: How to Hint at a Character’s Emotional Wound – Angela Ackerman

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

This is another great post from Romance University, that applies to all genres. Having a character showing flaws makes them human and more relatable. Thank you, Angela Ackerman!

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Supplying Breadcrumbs: How to Hint at a Character’s Emotional Wound – Angela Ackerman

by Angela Ackerman

Emotional wounds are transformative and have the power to re-shape a character in many negative ways, impacting their happiness, their self-worth, and causing mistrust and disillusionment to skew their worldview. This critical piece of backstory is key to understanding their motivations, and will impact their individual character’s arc, so knowing what it is, and how to show the fallout it generates is vitally important.

Regardless of whether you choose to show the emotional wound overtly during the story or merely hint at it, it will always be necessary to reference the event in smaller ways throughout. It’s a piece of the character’s past that holds vital significance; someone who’s endured the loss of a loved one, physical torture, or a messy divorce can’t simply forget it—especially if it hasn’t been dealt with. It will haunt her, and continue to hold her back in the story until it is dealt with.

Mastering the art of obliquely referencing what has happened in a way that reads naturally is an important skill to master as it pulls the reader deeper into the story through the art of subtext. There are many ways to seed ideas in the reader’s mind about the type of emotional trauma a character has suffered, including showing it through defense mechanisms. Here are three additional ways you can feed information about the event to readers without using info dumps or giving the whole thing away.

Read the full post on Romance University!

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Correspondence from the NaNo fields – Dumb conversations!

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Hello to all you writers and especially to all the NaNo’ers out there! How are you doing? Has your plot run out of steam? Or are your fingers flying off the keyboard?

I am actually caught up on my daily numbers and am trying to push ahead as I have two very important birthdays this month and I am responsible for Thanksgiving plus other family obligations. Of course, don’t forget work!

I am still world building but that is actually going much better now that I gave myself permission to write my thoughts out loud. Makes for some weird writing but it works.

Last year I spent my NaNo time focusing on dialogue. I still spend a lot of time reading how other people write good dialogue and will re-read how authors handle the talking bits.  When I was growing up, we were pushed in school to write a lot of adverbs and do the “Tom Swifty” type of writing. Which is horribly dated now and just silly.

But as my fingers are flying on the keyboard and in my quest to get my daily numbers and not overthink it, well I find myself making very bad puns in very inane dialogue.  Let’s face it, right now I am writing the backstory. Which is important to help me  know my characters a lot better, but it is nothing that I would ever put in the final story.

You see, I have been competing at NaNoWriMo for over ten years now and I know how quickly plot and story can run dry. So maybe I am a little PTSD and am padding the story in the beginning with really dumb conversations. Or maybe I am growing and learning that a solid backstory can add depth to a character that continues to show through in the main story.  “Just ignore me when I start giggling”, she said funnily.

Have a great day!

Paula

P.S. what is your favorite Tom Swifty?